NEWS AND RESEARCH UNIKEN August 2003 • 6

No bones about it, tissue engineering’s forging ahead
by Louisa Wright
Engineering bones and cartilage could soon be a reality, according to the organiser of a workshop on tissue engineering held at UNSW last month.
    The most widely understood example of tissue engineering is the growth of skin, which was extensively used on burns injuries in the wake of the Bali bombing last year.
    But workshop organiser, Associate Professor Clive McFarland of UNSW’s graduate school of biomedical engineering, says more ambitious tissue engineering projects could soon be underway.
    Every year thousands of patients are faced with a critical shortage of organs and tissues for transplantation and reconstructive surgery.
    Until recently, the biomedical professions had approached the issue of spare parts as a question of materials – for example hip or knee replacements, transplanted organs or the borrowing of parts, such as heart valves, from other species.
    But these don’t supply every need and often have the additional problem of wearing out as the recipient ages. Many high-demand organs are also not available in sufficient numbers for transplant.		     Over the past decade the new field of tissue engineering has arisen to meet this need.
    Cutting-edge thinking has turned to biological construction, using a range of cells including skin, muscle, cartilage, bone, marrow, endothelial and stem cells and other materials to form a scaffold on which those cells can be introduced into the body.
    Scaffolds may be made from natural or synthetic materials, usually designed as temporary structures which provide a template that allows the body’s own cells to grow and form new tissues while the scaffold is gradually absorbed. Professor Tom Davis’s team at the Centre for Advanced Macromolecular Design at UNSW has a range of cutting-edge technology and expertise they can bring to bear on the development of such materials.
    Since it is primarily the surface of these materials which the implanted cells will interact with, the ability to examine and modify the surface structure is a great advantage. And at UNSW, Professor Rob Lamb’s group at Surface Science and Technology are able to do precisely that.
    An understanding of the processes by which cells communicate with each other and interact with their environment is also crucial to directing the development of complex tissues, and UNSW’s Biotechnology Centre		 researchers are able to probe these processes thanks to their proteomics expertise.
    Another UNSW researcher, Professor Bernie Tuch of the Diabetes Transplant Unit, is looking at ways of growing insulin-producing cells outside the body, in order to reproduce pancreatic function. These cells are then encapsulated in engineered biomolecular ‘cages’ that allow them to function normally in a foreign host without triggering immune responses.
    Apart from the cell biology and the construction of degradable scaffolding, another area of biomolecular science is required to establish which biological signals these cells must receive in order to stimulate them into repair activity.
    McFarland said this sophisticated conceptual framework requires a team effort and a whole raft of technological expertise. Many of these skills are already present at UNSW and he would like to see a tissue engineering centre established at the University, which would also draw on collaborative frameworks with groups at other universities.
    In the USA, it has been estimated that tissue engineering solutions could address diseases and disorders accounting for about half of the nation’s total healthcare costs.
    CampusCamera

Tim Flannery.		 Why green is the new black
Leading scientist and author Dr Tim Flannery opened Eco-Innovate at UNSW last month.
The forum was designed to help young people from the Asia-Pacific region turn their ideas for sustainable consumption into viable applications. A key message of Eco-Innovate was the need to brand the eco-friendly lifestyle as sexy and cool. This formed part of the address from executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, Dr Klaus Töpfer, who delivered the annual Jack Beale Lecture on the global environment. Environmentally conscious producers need to re-brand themselves as “the fashion of the season”, said Töpfer.