Research
Regenerative medicine has been identified by the government as one of “8 great technologies” vital to driving UK economic growth and our centre confirms Leeds’ place as a leader in the discipline.
Research projects already underway include creating biological scaffolds to repair tissues by regenerating a patient's own cells and developing practical stem cell-based therapies for musculoskeletal, cardiovascular and neural problems.
Our expertise is in the area of musculoskeletal and cardiovascular systems with our research focusing on three main areas - Joint Replacement, Tissue Re-engineering and Functional Spinal Interventions.
Multidisciplinary research projects will be available in a number of faculties and departments across the university including in the School of Mechanical Engineering, School of Biomedical Sciences, Medicine, Dentistry, Design and Chemistry.
Examples of the types of projects
- Application of a novel liquid chemical sterilisation method to cardiac valves
- Enhanced decellularised osteochondral scaffolds for cartilage repair
- Biomechanics of vascularity in non-traumatic cord injury
- Engineering biological bridges to reconnect a severed spinal cord
- Enhanced stratified pre-clinical simulation of the natural knee
- Investigating the effects of mechanical forces on tissue regenerative responses of mesenchymal stem cells in the ankle joint
- Effect of bone shape and quality on ankle contact mechanics
- Developing, refining, and validating patient specific tuneable activity monitor algorithms
- Development and experimental hardware simulation of a stumble cycle for pre-clinical testing of knee replacement implants
- Refining and validating anatomical reference systems within computational models of hip function
- Musculoskeletal Analysis of Sport for Healthy Ageing
- Investigation of Wear, Wear Particle Size and Biocompatibility of Advanced Nanocomposite Polymers for THR
- Neural cell responses to wear debris from spinal instrumentation and devices
- Motion compensation for multimodal and multiparametric preclinical imaging in mice
- Biomechanical evaluation of osteochondral repair in the knee
- In vitro simulation and assessment of clinically relevant damage at the cartilage-labral junction of the hip joint
- Reverse engineering impingement in total hip replacements [CASE award with Depuy Synthes]
- Osteochondral tissue engineering using novel natural collagen scaffolds, epigenetic approaches and multi-layered cell sheet technology