(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) - The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) has awarded a pair of $1.8 million grants to two UC Davis scientists to develop better tools for enabling physicians to assess the safety and efficacy of bioengineered tissues used to treat cardiovascular disease and bone and cartilage repair. Laura Marcu, a professor of biomedical engineering and neurological surgery, and her colleagues, aim to combine label-free optical and ultrasonic imaging technologies so that newly developed vascular replacement materials - typically used in surgical grafts to restore blood flow - can be better assessed and monitored directly in patients and thus prevent a graft's potential failure. Kent Leach, an associate professor of biomedical engineering and orthopaedic surgery, will lead an interdisciplinary research team that will also develop advanced light and sound technologies to detect changes in engineered bone and cartilage. The goal of the project is to ultimately provide clinicians with improved abilities to identify if and how implanted cells are maturing and functioning in patients. Having these types of new diagnostic imaging capabilities could accelerate the development and clinical applications of everything from engineered vascular grafts, which currently can pose significant complications for patients, to stem cell therapies for regenerating bone and cartilage in diseased or damaged areas of the human body. "The broad range of biophotonic and ultrasound technologies developed in our laboratory could improve our ability to produce safer, more functional engineered tissues in the laboratory and large animal models to speed their use in clinical settings," said Marcu, who also is co-principal investigator on Leach's research project. "It should improve real-time, non-invasive, label-free imaging capabilities and give us a more thorough assessment of site-specific cellular growth and functional properties when engineered tissues are used." The two CIRM grants are part of the state stem cell agency's latest Tools and Technologies Initiative, which is designed to support research that addresses unique translational challenges in regenerative medicine. The three-year research grants that were awarded by the agency last week focus on the creation, design and testing of novel or existing tools and technologies to address translational bottlenecks to stem cell therapies. "Sometimes even the most promising therapy can be derailed by a tiny problem," said Jonathan Thomas, chair of the CIRM Board, in a statement regarding the nearly $30 million in grants that stem cell agency approved at its Jan. 29 meeting. "These awards are designed to help find ways to overcome those problems, to bridge the gaps in our knowledge and ensure that the best research is able to keep progressing and move out of the lab and into clinical trials in patients." In her CIRM proposal, Marcu noted that cardiovascular disease, when combined with rising rates of peripheral artery disease and ischemic stroke, make the illness the most prominent health problem in California and the United States. "Our goal is to help develop a diagnostic technology that is more practical and less costly than what is currently available," said Marcu, whose project is being done in collaboration with Leigh Griffiths at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and Claus Sondergaard at the UC Davis School of Medicine. "We want to be able to more rapidly screen vascular scaffold production and real-time assessments, on an ongoing basis, of bioengineered vascular tissues after studies are performed in patients or in animals. Having that type of ability could allow clinicians to more readily identify early signs of rejection and vascular graft failure and thereby improve safety and efficacy for use in patients." As new therapies are developed to treat the disease, especially involving tissue grafts and patches engineered with unique cellular material, the need for devices to test and monitor bioengineered products will be all the more important. "Currently, using stem cells to generate individualized implantable grafts suffers from patient-to-patient variability that is unpredictable and immeasurable without destructive techniques," said Leach, whose project also includes Kyriacos Athanasiou, chair of UC Davis' Department of Biomedical Engineering. "The aging population of California, 20 percent of whom will be over the age of 65 in the next decade, will require functional replacement tissues to maintain their quality of life. We simply cannot assess the success or failure of a cellular therapy in living individuals, and it represents a major bottleneck in translating stem cell technologies to the clinic and delivering quality products for patients. We need nondestructive, minimally invasive methods to measure dynamic changes in tissue development." UC Davis' stem cell program director, Jan Nolta, also sees great benefits for regenerative medicine research from the tools Marcu and Leach are developing. "One of the great barriers in regenerative medicine is our ability to understand and monitor what happens after stem cells are given to a patient," said Nolta, who also directs the UC Davis Institute for Regenerative Cures in Sacramento. "We need to be able to tell whether the blood vessels are truly improving, and whether the bone and cartilage are getting stronger. This type of novel biomedical imaging research will advance our clinical assessment capabilities and add to our efforts to safely turn stem cells into cures."

For more information, visit http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/stemcellresearch

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$3.6 Million in Grants for Pair of UC Davis Scientists