Event

BIOE Honors Program Defense: Amelia Hurley-Novatny

Tuesday, April 9, 2019
10:00 a.m.
A. James Clark Hall, Room 4104
Dr. Kim Stroka
kstroka@umd.edu

Amelia Hurley-Novatny

Spatiotemporal growth factor release for engineering the bone-tendon enthesis

Severe tendon and ligament injuries are estimated to affect between 200,000 and 300,000 people annually. Surgical repairs of these injuries often have poor long-term clinical outcomes because of resection of the interfacial tissue known as the enthesis and subsequent stress concentration at the attachment site. A healthy enthesis consists of distinct regions of bone, fibrocartilage, and tendon, each with distinct cell types, extracellular matrix components, and architecture, each of which is important for function of the tissue. Tissue engineering, which has been proposed as a potential strategy to replacing this tissue, is currently limited by the ability to differentiate multiple lineages of cells from a single starting stem cell population within a single engineered construct. In this thesis, we develop a microparticle-hydrogel system for spatiotemporal control of protein, which is then validated for use for multi-lineage differentiation. We also show the differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells down osteogenic, chondrogenic, and tenogenic lineages, each of which is maintained in hydrogel culture. Finally, we show that this method is able to guide heterogenous and spatially-confined changes in mesenchymal stem cell gene and protein expression. We believe that these studies demonstrate the utility of the culture technique for engineering other musculoskeletal tissue interfaces and provide a biochemical approach for recapitulating the bone-tendon enthesis in vitro.