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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