Tissue Engineering and Eardrum Regeneration -Membrane Repair !

Can tissue engineering provide a cheap and convenient alternative to surgery for eardrum repair?

In the most severe cases, a ruptured eardrum can require surgery to put it right, but tissue-engineering techniques might provide a much simpler solution.

The eardrum, or tympanic membrane, forms the interface between the outside world and the delicate bony structures of the middle ear — the ossicles — that conduct sound vibrations to the inner ear. At just a fraction of a millimetre thick and held under tension, the membrane is perfectly adapted to transmit even the faintest of vibrations. But the qualities that make the eardrum such a good conductor of sound come at a price: fragility. Burst eardrums are a major cause of conductive hearing loss — when sounds can't pass from the outer to the inner ear.

Most burst eardrums are caused by infections or trauma. The vast majority heal on their own in about ten days, but for a small proportion of people the perforation fails to heal naturally. These chronic ruptures cause conductive hearing loss and increase the risk of middle ear infections, which can have serious complications.

Marching to a new beat -David Holmes

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Repairing the eardrum: The sound of self-healing

Source: Nature

Boosting the Immune System to Effect Repairs and Fight Disease

Applications from Regenerative Medicine to Gene Therapy to Antiviral Therapeutics Emphasize Self-Healing

Therapeutic interventions of various kinds try to improve the body’s capacity to defend, repair, and even cure itself. Interventions that attempt to enhance self-healing span cell-based therapy, gene therapy, small molecule drugs, biologics, and tissue engineering.

Advances in each of these areas are being followed by Allied Market Research, which has concluded that stem cell technologies look especially promising. For example, stem cell technologies are set to revolutionize the human ability to produce neural cells in abundance.

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Source: genengnews

Transforming our lives with laboratory-grown organs

With people living longer than ever, being able to replace bits of the human body as they wear out has become a new frontier in medicine.

Most babies born in 1900 died before the age of 50; 100 years later life expectancy in the UK now exceeds 80 years, with the number of over-65s expected to double by 2030. This trend is radically changing the age demographics of the population and creating a new set of challenges for engineers. One of the most significant of these is to give people a higher quality of life in their old age.

Significant progress has been made; 300,000 hip replacements are now performed annually worldwide, releasing people from pain, and extending the active period of their lives by 20 years or more. The success of these implants has led scientists to develop a new type of biomaterial that is promising to do for medicine what silicon did for computing.

Historically the function of biomaterials has been to replace diseased or damaged tissues. These biomaterials were selected to be as inert as possible while fulfilling mechanical roles such as teeth filling and hip replacement.

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UCL professor Alex Seifalian holds the trachea that was used in the first synthetic organ transplant

Source: RexShutterstock