BME7900 Seminar: Michael Albro (Boston University)

Description

Novel Strategies for the Diagnostics and Repair of Cartilage Injuries

Articular cartilage is a soft connective tissue that enables nearly frictionless load transmission at synovial joint interfaces. Injuries to cartilage are common in young individuals and often difficult to treat. If left untreated, degeneration progresses, leading to the painful and debilitating condition of osteoarthritis. Current cartilage repair strategies achieve only short-term clinical benefits, due in large part to limitations in imaging modalities, which are unable to diagnose cartilage damage early, and limited tissue regeneration therapies, which generally fail to regenerate cartilage with a composition to achieve requisite load-supporting functionality. Accordingly, both advanced diagnostics and new innovative therapies are urgently needed to address this clinical challenge.

In this talk, I will present two of our interdisciplinary research projects aimed towards addressing these complex challenges. In the first half of my talk, I describe our group’s efforts to develop a Raman arthroscopic probe for clinical diagnostics of cartilage health. Raman spectroscopy is an inelastic optical light scattering technique that provides a quantitative optical fingerprint of a tissue’s molecular building blocks (amides, sulfates, carboxylic acids, and hydroxyls), thus offering a non-destructive, label free diagnostic tool for articular cartilage. Through a series of ex vivo and in vivo models, we have established the capability of Raman-probe-derived optical biomarkers to predict the composition and functional material properties of cartilage with a sensitivity beyond that achieved by ‘gold standard’ histopathology grading and quantitative MRI. In the future, we envision Raman needle arthroscopy to serve as a transformative clinical tool to guide the implementation of surgical cartilage repair procedures and to monitor the tissue response to standard-of-care and emerging therapies.

In the second half of my talk, I present our group’s efforts to develop novel strategies for optimizing growth factor delivery to improve the regeneration of articular cartilage. Here, our work has uncovered previously unanticipated mechanisms that limit growth factor delivery to engineered cartilage tissues. Notably, for conventional growth factor delivery platforms, cell-mediated reactions limit the uptake and retention of growth factors in engineered cartilage, leading to tissues that fail to achieve requisite composition and material properties for mechanical function. As an alternative approach, we have developed a bio-inspired strategy where growth factors are delivered to cells in their native latent form, enabling cell-mediated, need-based activation that promotes long-term exposure of physiologic growth factor activity regimens, leading to the fabrication of engineered tissues that better recapitulate the composition, structure, and material properties of native cartilage.
 

Bio:
Prof. Michael Albro currently serves as assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Boston University with affiliations in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Division of Material Science & Engineering, and Photonics Center. His musculoskeletal research group incorporates disciplines of biomechanics, biomaterials, and optics in order to: 1) improve our understanding of the pathophysiology of osteoarthritis, 2) develop novel modalities for diagnostics of cartilage degeneration, and 3) develop novel chondroregenerative platforms for OA treatment. Prof. Albro received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and served as a Marie Curie International Fellow in the Stevens Group at Imperial College London. His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation, and Arthritis Foundation. He recently received the NSF CAREER Award, Dr. James R. Neff Research Award from MTF Biologics, and the Material Science & Engineering Innovation Award from Boston University.