Mark Grimes
University of Montana, MT·Biomedical Engineering
Rebuilding a nose or an ear after a birth defect or injury is hard for surgeons. Cartilage features are difficult to recreate with plastic surgery, and transplanted tissue is often rejected unless patients take immune-suppressing drugs.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Biology
- Topics
craniofacial cartilage
neural crest stem cells
induced pluripotent stem cells
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2027
What they work on
- Test whether seeding human neural crest stem cells in 3D hydrogel scaffolds with extracellular matrix components identified in organoids makes craniofacial cartilage faster and more reproducibly than self-organizing organoids.
- Determine whether those extracellular matrix components act as signals that drive chondrocyte (cartilage cell) differentiation, beyond serving as structural material.
- Test whether adding growth factors, whose receptors were found in mesenchyme cells and nascent chondrocytes, activates signaling pathways that speed cartilage fate in 3D cultures.
- Combine neural crest stem cell differentiation with 3D bioprinting to work toward scaling up functional, transplantable craniofacial cartilage.
More about the research
Growing true head-and-face (craniofacial) cartilage from a patient's own stem cells could solve both problems. That is not yet possible, because too little is known about how human cells become cartilage in the first place.
Why it matters
Patients with craniofacial birth defects or facial injuries could eventually benefit from cartilage grown from their own stem cells, avoiding rejection and lifelong immunosuppressants. The work is aimed at the long-term goal of building noses, ears and other facial cartilage in the lab, and may also inform understanding of craniofacial birth defects and cancers that arise from neural crest cells.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Michael Mak
Stony Brook University, NY·Biomedical Engineering
Develop biofabrication methods that tune the architecture of natural, unmodified collagen I across scales, from fiber networks to whole-tissue geometry, to build realistic engineered tissues and mini-organs.
Quinton Smith
University of California-Irvine, CA·Biomedical Engineering
Test how paracrine signals and mechanical cues guide early cell fate decisions, using micropatterned induced gastrulation models of human induced pluripotent stem cells confined to defined geometries.
Miqin Zhang
University of Washington, WA·Biomedical Engineering
Test how the composition and stiffness of chitosan–alginate (CA) scaffolds control human induced pluripotent stem cell self-renewal, and whether optimized scaffolds support long-term growth of tooth epithelial stem cells and neural crest cells.
The school
University of Montana: 3 labs on PI Pages, $144M a year on research, 74 research doctorates a year.
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