Research into harnessing the ability of the body’s immune system to encourage severely injured tissue to regenerate has landed a Maryland researcher on a TIME magazine list of 2024 innovators.
The TIME100 Next list recognizes today’s most influential and innovative leaders.
During a WTOP visit to the laboratory she leads at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, researcher Kaitlyn Sadtler, explained its goal is to understand the immune system’s role in wound healing and how it could be leveraged by medical technology to regenerate tissue.
“Our laboratory works on traumatic injury and the intersection of trying to build those broken tissues back,” said Sadtler, who grew up in Frederick — 40 miles from the National Institutes of Health campus where she works in Bethesda.
Researchers are still trying to fully understand and predict how the immune system will react. Currently, introducing medical devices, including pacemakers, knee replacements as well as chin and breast implants can elicit hostile immune responses.
However, in other cases immune responses can stimulate healing.
Sadtler said her lab’s research is “not just preventing the infection that might occur, but actually building those tissues.”
As an example, she said after a car crash, understanding the immune system could help regenerate skeletal muscles. Her research includes “learning the different materials that surgeons use to help reconstruct and regrow those tissues and organ, and how we can make better materials, to help us regenerate.”
Sadtler said the current standard of care for people with soft tissue injuries, including skin and muscle injuries, is to use grafts and transfers. That treatment requires surgeons to cause another injury, while trying to treat the larger one.
“The general goal with biomaterials and bioengineering is to be able to avoid stuff like that, and put in materials that will help use our immune cells to grow the tissue back, without having to take it from somewhere else on your body,” she said.
The lab’s research includes finding ways to complete a repair, while steering the immune system toward stimulating reparative processes.
As an example, Sadtler displayed a small container of polyethylene, a plastic used to make orthopedic implants that can trigger long-term inflammation and scarring as small pieces of it are shed into surrounding tissues. Often those implants need to be removed and replaced.
Another small bottle contained decellularized small intestinal submucosa — pig tissue that has been stripped of its cells, leaving behind mostly collagen. While natural biomaterials might not be suitable for all medical applications, she said researchers are learning about the possibilities.
“If we can design materials that our immune system likes, won’t reject and will accept into body, we can avoid those issues” of inflammation and scarring.
Sadtler said the study of the immune system’s role in regenerating tissue is ongoing from the lab setting, ranging from a Petri dish to preclinical trials, including Sadtler’s group study on stimulating the regeneration of leg muscles in mice, published last year in the journal Nature Materials.
“We want to make therapies for humans,” said Sadtler. “There have been clinical products that have been put into people, and these are used in hospital around the globe that are growing those tissues back.”
With her lab’s current research on the body’s immune system, “we’re trying to improve on those materials, and learn from the ones that work and get them to work better.”
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