Bones grown in vivo

An international team of biomedical engineers has demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to grow healthy new bone reliably in one part of the body and use it to repair damaged bone at a different location.

The research, which is based on a departure from the current practice in tissue engineering, is described in a paper titled "In vivo engineering of organs: The bone bioreactor" published online next week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

"We have shown that we can grow predictable volumes of bone on demand," says V. Prasad Shastri, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt University who led the effort. "And we did so by persuading the body to do what it already knows how to do."

"This research has important implications not only for engineering bone, but for engineering tissues of any kind," adds co-author Robert S. Langer, Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a pioneer in the field of tissue engineering. "It has the potential for changing the way that tissue engineering is done in the future."