Organised by VPHi student committee, featuring Prof. Gerard Athesian from Columbia University on 30 September at 15 CEST. Chair: S. Mukherhee.
Articular cartilage is the bearing material of diarthrodial joints. It supports contact stresses of up to 12 MPa while exhibiting a friction coefficient as low as 0.002. Cartilage degeneration is a hallmark of osteoarthritis, a debilitating degenerative joint disease that afflicts 30 million Americans. As there is no cure for osteoarthritis, significant focus has been placed on repair strategies such as tissue engineering. Though much progress has been made from empirical approaches in the field of cartilage tissue engineering, we believe that culture conditions that help reproduce functional properties in cartilage constructs may be optimized using suitable theories of growth mechanics based on reactive mixture theory. In this webinar, it will be discussed how advances in theoretical and computational growth mechanics have been applied to enhance nutrient supply to constructs and engineer constructs having the size of entire articular layers. It will also be presented intriguing results that growth of tissue constructs may be accompanied by damage of the freshly synthesized collagen matrix. Strategies for countering this damage will be addressed.
You can find the webinar recordings HEREand you can download Prof. Ateshian's slides HERE
