“Orthopaedic Tissue Interface System”
Jacob Scherba, S.B. ’18, bioengineering
Advisor: David Mooney, Robert P. Pinkas Family Professor of Bioengineering
Tendons and ligaments are comprised of highly aligned collagen and fibroblasts, which give the tissue strength and robustness capable of withstanding repeated applied mechanical forces. Scherba set out to create an in vitro system that would model this novel cellular alignment. He engineered a biocompatible bone scaffold and a collagen hydrogel system, called OTIS, which promotes the unique fibroblast alignment that is a hallmark of tendons and ligaments. Since the collagen hydrogel is viscoelastic, the cells are able to remodel their environment, mimicking a tendon. At a cost of only about 40 cents per unit, OTIS could provide a low-cost method to weed out therapies and drugs that won’t work prior to moving into a more expensive model.
“My biggest inspiration for this project was my younger sister. She suffers from Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and, after looking into the literature, I realized there weren't great in vitro models for EDS, so I saw an open space to design a physiologically relevant in vitro model of orthopaedic tissue,” he said. “OTIS is a very user-friendly model that could be easily adopted by biomedical researchers. It represents a new research platform that could lead to the possible identification of new therapies before moving into more expensive in vivo models.”