Projects

Osteoarthritis is a painful joint disease in which cartilage has worn out. Nearly 1.5 million people in the Netherlands have osteoarthritis and for many patients there is currently no treatment that can cure or slow down the disease. This leads to movement restrictions and pain for patients.

To improve the lives of osteoarthritis patients, a team of researchers from the LS-CarE project are developing sustainable regenerative cartilage implants. These living implants are based on revolutionary stem cell, bioreactor and 3D printing technologies. This project creates support among both patients and clinicians for the applicability and among industry for marketing the developed implants by the active involvement these partners.

Various project groups at the universities in Eindhoven, Utrecht, and Leiden, at the UMCs in Leiden and Utrecht, but also at the affiliated universities of applied sciences will work together to develop a new regenerative cartilage implant. The five-year project started in 2022 and the first research results are coming in.

For more information, please visit www.ls-care.nl

A major challenge in the field of Regenerative Medicine and Tissue engineering remains the immune response and rejection by the host, independent of the type of tissue generated. Therefore, this seed project investigated the immunogenicity of allogeneic Adult stem cell (ASC) derived- or Pluripotent Stem Cell (PSC)- derived organoids in a pre-clinical setting and identified potential strategies to evade or mitigate this immune response.

The project resulted in a successful collaboration in which standardized protocols for assessing and quantifying key molecules involved in immune responses against non-self tissues were established. The characterization and understanding of the potential interference with the immunogenicity of distinct organoids will be vital for the success of the clinical implementation of organoid-based organ repair or replacement. Therefore, it is critical and clinically highly relevant to continue the work initiated in this pilot project

The use of iPSCs and organoids as active cell sources to produce functional tissues is beyond discussion, but requires the generation of sufficient numbers of well characterized cells and functional organoids. This project further investigated the scaling of iPSC- and ASC-derived organoid production and tackled the rate-limiting steps of laborious lab scale culturing.

In this collaborative effort, researchers have successfully scaled up the cultivation of various organoids to the mesoscale. The project achieved in conjunction with Scinus Cell Expansion B.V.

In summary, this research establishes a solid groundwork for innovative strategies in upscaling the production of various organoids, making a significant contribution to the manufacturing of clinically relevant functional replacement parts, contributing to progress in the field of regenerative medicine.