Production of a safer, osteogenic, tissue engineered bone allograft

Abstract

The use of allograft bone is effective in the treatment of large bone loss following tumour removal or surgery. However, it is not osteogenic due to a lack of viable osteogenic cells and the remaining marrow material is potentially harmful to the recipient. Sterilisation techniques, such as gamma irradiation, are routinely used to improve the safety of these grafts; however this fails to remove the immunogenic material and may diminish the bones innate properties. Thus, wash techniques are being developed to remove the deleterious marrow, whilst retaining the native properties of the bone so that through tissue engineering, pre-osteogenic cells may be added to aid osseointegration. To this end, this study utilised a novel wash process (developed by the National Health Service Blood and Transplant Tissue services (NHSBT)) on whole human femoral heads, to assess the resulting material's suitability as a biological scaffold for bone tissue engineering (BTE). Following the wash process, marrow removal efficiency was analysed by biochemical testing and histological assessment, and biocompatibility of fresh-frozen and washed human bone was assessed using extract cytotoxicity assays with BM-MSCs. The results showed a marrow removal efficiency of 99.5%, leaving a material with only 16.7 ng DNA/100mg of dry material, and which histologically displayed minimal cellular content demonstrating that this was an efficient wash process producing an acellular biological scaffold material (

Date of Award	1 Aug 2015
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Judith Hoyland (Supervisor), Stephen Richardson (Supervisor) & Timothy Board (Supervisor)