In a breakthrough, scientists have crafted a key part of a human jaw bone from stem cells and say the same process they used can be used to repair all types of bones in the human body.
The team of scientists from Columbia took stem cells from a patient's bone marrow and seeded them on a specially-crafted scaffold that was shaped specifically to fit the needed replacement part. And a bioreactor was used to infuse precise levels of nutrients to feed the bone as it grew.
"The availability of personalized bone grafts engineered from the patient's own stem cells would revolutionize the way we currently treat these defects," said lead researcher Dr Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic.
- check out the article from the BBC