Bone-in-a-Box
Bone is an essential stabilising tissue of the human body, which is highly vascularised. A functional vascular network is crucial for bone regeneration to repair e.g. bone defects in fields such as oral and maxillofacial surgery, orthopedics, and traumatology. The reconstruction of bone defects still remains challenging. Maxillary sinus floor elevation (MSFE) is a frequently performed surgical procedure to restore insufficient jaw bone height in the posterior maxilla, eventually enabling to insert dental implants. Angiogenesis and osteogenesis are tightly coupled processes.
This project aims to develop an in vitro “Bone-in-a-Box” model that accurately recapitulates an in vivo human bone regeneration model, to elucidate blood vessel and bone cell interactions during bone development and repair, and to extrapolate the results to clinical application for bone defect reconstruction such as MSFE.
The “Bone-in-a-Box” consists of a heterogeneous stromal vascular-fraction (SVF), containing adipose stem cells and endothelial cells, a bone slice obtained from alveolar bone next to a removed maxillary third molar, a scaffold material, and culture medium. It is hypothesised that the heterogeneous SVF from adipose tissue, bone, growth factors, and hypoxia will all positively contribute to vascularisation and concomitant bone regeneration in bone defects.
Once developed, the model allows to test different scaffolds and peptides for their vasculogenic and/or osteogenic properties. Moreover, the model allows in vitro pre-screening of patients with insufficient bone height to allow dental implant placement for prediction of bone regeneration capacity in vivo resulting from the bone augmentation procedure. “Bone-in-a-Box” will represent a humanised in vitro model of bone regeneration, thereby refining, reducing, and ultimately replacing animal models in bone research. For the development and usage of this model, Shenzhen Hoogbio Science & Technology Co., LTD, teams up with Academic Centre for Dentistry Amsterdam (ACTA) and Amsterdam University Medical Centers (Amsterdam UMC).
