Year 2
Our goal was to develop a novel therapy for complex bone fractures that do not spontaneously heal and require bone grafting. Bone grafts can be harvested from the patient or obtained from tissue banks. Both approaches entail hazardous disadvantages such as prolonged pain, infection and graft failure. We proposed to recruit the body’s own stem cells to the fracture site and then to activate them to rapidly form bone by delivering a bone-inducing molecule using ultrasound. In the 1st year of the project we established the model and therapeutic protocol. During the 2nd year we tested the protocol in a bone fracture model that mimics the clinical scenario in trauma patients. Our results so far have been very encouraging indicating that we were able to repair all fractures after one treatment. Our results are based on x-ray imaging and biomechanical testing analyses performed 6 weeks post treatment.