Carey Dunne
From the Jaw Down
the eye interviews gordana vunjak-novakovic
PrintGordana Vunjak-Novakovic, a researcher at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, recently completed the development of the temporomandibular joint, the joint where your two jaws meet, from bone marrow stem cells. The Eye chats with Vunjak-Novakovic about her background and the importance of her lab’s work.
Where did you go to school? Is tissue engineering something you researched?
I went to school in Belgrade, in former Yugoslavia, now Serbia, and I got almost all my degrees there. ... As soon as I graduated in chemical engineering, I started to think of what I was going to do with my life—because I was not totally interested in continuing down the same path, and I was pretty interested in biology. And this was the time before biomedical engineering became a well-established field—before tissue engineering, before stem cells, before all of it. So I applied for Fulbright.
How did you get involved in the field?
I ran into Robert Langer. He is probably the most famous biomedical engineer of our time.... He was working on detoxification of human blood and recirculating blood through a bioreactor containing immobilized enzyme, ... and these bioreactors were exactly what I had done for my Ph.D. thesis, though not focusing on biology or blood or enzymes at all. So I started to collaborate with him. … And one year, when I was at MIT for the summer … he said that this would be a good time for me to take a sabbatical and come work with him on this big project in tissue engineering. And I said, “Tissue what?” Because it just wasn’t a field back then.
When did you come Columbia?
An opportunity came that brought me to Columbia to build the program—literally. I mean, we were building this lab out of a very old hospital area. But I got to design the lab, to bring in people, to bring in programs—to make things happen. And this is what I love to do. So because Columbia is a great place and I really love my department, I ended up here in the summer of 2005. And in the meantime, human cells became a reality, so that’s what we work with now. The bioreactors are much more advanced now, and we are constructing systems for a variety of tissues and using these tissues. … The whole area exploded, and now I’m here!
It’s incredible how much your lab has been able to do in such a short period of time.
Honestly, it’s the good people. This is it. You just get the best people you can and keep them happy and let them do what they want, and it just works.
So tell me about the jaw bone.
It’s made from imaging from a real patient—it is the tip of the jaw right at the joint. It is the only moving joint in your skull.
How did you start this?
We need to give credit to the first author. His name is Warren Grayson. He was the first post-doc who came here with me. ... In simple terms, we had been working on tissue engineering of bone for a long time now. And we are able to develop human bone in the lab from stem cells derived from bone marrow or liposuction. … And we have done this by letting the cells grow on their own. ... Tissue engineering really is an art, in a way. We are trying to fool the cells, to trick them into thinking everything is perfect, and then they get to do the hard stuff. The cells don’t know where they are—are they in the body, or are they in a bioreactor? They don’t know, they just see the conditions. The conditions are two really important components. One is scaffolding. Just like when you build a building, you need to put the scaffold up to hold it temporarily. The scaffolding material looks like bone by composition, structure, and mechanics, and then we put the cells in. And in order to keep them alive and happy, you need to provide them with food and oxygen and let them metabolize and whatnot. ... So we looked for the most complex and convoluted bone we could find, and we settled on this. So it’s like, “OK, this is difficult enough, let’s try to make this.”
And why exactly is this such an important event in the field?
This is important in two ways—one is that we can make a piece of tissue that is going to be useful, which is clearly a very good thing. And it’s made fully biological, so it functions like bone, it grows with you, and it provides all functions like a normal bone. So you could put a piece of titanium in its place, which provides mechanical control, but not metabolic control. The other reason it’s important is that it’s a great model for studying how bone forms. You know, how the conditions affect the decision of these cells to become bone. Because the same cells from bone marrow can form other things like cartilage, fat, muscle—so you need to sort of convince them to become bone.
Does your lab work with other kinds of tissue engineering?
Yeah, we work probably 50/50 with bone and heart. … You always need what we call biomimetics, which is imitating nature, so in all cases, we’re really trying to provide the cells with the conditions they will normally experience during development.
29 October 2009
vol. 7, issue 7
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