The Gillian Reny Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2014 Stepping Strong Innovator Awards.
Each year, the Stepping Strong Innovator Awards support research and innovation across the continuum of trauma care from prevention to treatment and recovery. The following individuals received this year’s awards:
Despite remarkable advances in the technology underlying modern-day prosthetics, the surgical approach to lower extremity amputation has remained largely unchanged for patients whose legs cannot be salvaged. Matthew Carty, MD, and his team propose a new technique that may enable patients to interface with next-generation prostheses to restore fine movement, sensation, and proprioception—in essence, to recover normal limb function. Through a collaborative effort involving plastic, orthopedic, and vascular surgeons at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, along with biomechatronics experts from MIT, the team envisions developing an operative technique for limb amputation that could become the new standard of care.
This Stepping Strong Innovator Awardee also received the Stepping Strong Breakthrough Award to further this research project.
Current material options for orthopedic implants consist of nondegradable metals and degradable polymers. Metal alloys have long been the gold standard for large traumatic defect repair due to their robust mechanical properties and ease of implantation. However, the strength of the metal-based implants relative to the strength of the surrounding bone results in stress shielding, and the reduced microstrain experienced by bone, which is critical to the healing process, leads to poor bone healing and, in some cases, the need for additional surgery. Through this project, George Dyer, MD, focuses on a new way to accelerate bone healing using fully degradable, silk-based surgical repair rods and bioactive molecules. The hope is that this surgical approach will ultimately replace metal alloys, the current standard for large traumatic defect repair, with degradable devices, thus minimizing the need for second surgeries and transforming outcomes for patients with all types of orthopedic injuries.
When muscles are injured, the body utilizes muscle stem cells to regenerate new muscle in the damaged area. But there are only a limited number of stem cells in any given muscle. If the injury is large and the number of stem cells is depleted, the body heals muscle with non-functional scar tissue instead. In this case, patients lose strength and maybe even the ability to walk. Within the past year, major breakthroughs in muscle stem cell research have allowed us to isolate muscle stem cells from a small biopsy and help them grow quickly in a laboratory setting. These cells can then be injected back into healing muscle to maintain muscle strength and function. For patients with lower extremity injuries, Indranil Sinha, MD, and his team can potentially take a small muscle biopsy from the shoulder, isolate and grow the muscle stem cells, and inject them back into the area that’s injured. The expectation is that this approach could help patients preserve strength, function, and their ability to walk without the aid of prosthetic devices.
Tendon regenerative medicine strategies aim to target endogenous stem or progenitor cells to improve repair outcomes or use isolated progenitor cells for tissue engineering approaches to create a better engineered tissue with optimal healing potential. Jenna Galloway, PhD, will apply single-cell RNA-sequencing technology to establish a pipeline for the isolation of tendon progenitors and to identify pathways that could be targeted for their activation. Successful completion of these goals would provide a framework for new, innovative therapies for tendon and ligament injuries.
This Stepping Strong Innovator Awardee also received the Stepping Strong Breakthrough Award to further this research project.
Amid a critical gap in trauma research funding, The Gillian Reny Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation catalyzes multidisciplinary, multi-institutional collaboration to transform care for civilian and military heroes recovering from traumatic injury.
Learn more about the work we fund and stay connected to future Innovator Award opportunities.
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