Our research is focussed on developing strategies that support the patient’s ability to regenerate and repair bone that has become damaged as a result of disease or trauma. Understanding how bone forms during development and how fractures in healthy patients repair informs us of potential approaches that may be developed to produce scaffolds/implants that can be used to assist the repair of fractures and other bone defects that require surgical intervention to repair. Much of this research is translational in nature, meaning that some research in the lab has transferred to commercial development with the aim of bringing it to clinical use.
Our key research areas are:
- Developing medical implant materials that aid bone regeneration when used in the treatment of bone diseases or trauma;
- Developing strategies for in situ Tissue Engineering, using scaffolds and implants that direct the patient’s own cells to regenerate/repair tissue;
- Understand how hypoxic (low oxygen concentration) environments that occur during a critical stage of bone development can be ‘mimicked’ by pharmacological strategies to aid bone regeneration;
- Utilise nanotechnology to produce better medical implants for the treatment of joint disease and difficult to heal fractures;
- Develop lab-based models that can be used to assess the performance of bone regeneration strategies.
The research team is led by Professor Iain Gibson at the University of Aberdeen. The team is based at the Institute of Medical Sciences at the Foresterhill Health Campus and also the Department of Chemistry in Old Aberdeen.