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Well, what we’ve created is a technology that makes hollow porous core sheath nano
fibers. So, essentially we have nano fibers which are on a size scale which mimics the
dominant protein inside the body collagen. So its a hundred to three hundred nano meters
much smaller than one hair on your head. And what we’ve done now in addition to making
this size scale of fibers which is not uncommon, we’ve made these hollow within the inside
of these fibers and the sheath is porous, which means it has a lot of holes in it. You
can think of it as a as a tiny soaker hose essentially if you were to imagine that. What
we’re trying to create is what you can think of as a programmable bandage essentially for
a patient specific traumatic wound. What we’ve thought about from this process is you have
a wounded war fighter for example returning home from combat that has a large expansive
wound. So, on the outside what we need to do is create an anti-microbial antibacterial
surface. But we don’t want to just stop there as you progress into the wound; we want
to not only deliver pain relief so we want to release compounds that will control pain
and inflammation. We also want to control the tissue engineering regenerative medicine.
So, stem cells which we can also deliver by taking a little bit of this person’s fat,
we can get stem cells from that fat. And based on what the scaffold is delivering we can
control those stem cells to regenerate new tissue at the site. What we do in the lab
as a whole to promote this is I have the variety of graduate and undergraduate students that
look at how do we control stem cell fate in combination with how do we do these control
release scaffolds. So, the definition of a stem cell is that you can turn it into many
different types of cells. So, in our lab we mostly focus on muscular skeletal tissue.
So bone, cartilage, tendon. So, what we want to do is take these stem cells from the fat
and we want to put them on different what we call substrate stiffness’s. So, you can
think of that as bone as being very stiff. You can think of bone as being like a hard
piece of glass. Whereas, cartilage is a little, is a little softer. It’s closer to jello.
Not quite as soft as jello. So, basically what we can do is change the stiffness of
what you’re actually growing the cells on to help enhance taking these stem cells into
different types. So, you can turn them into bone cells. You can turn them into cartilage
cells. And then you can put them back into the patient if they have an injury. So, it’s
a multi-layer scaffold that because of the fiber’s diffusional properties can deliver
all of these different compounds. And, and hopefully regenerate tissue and, and stop
infection simultaneously.