cartilage – NIH Director's Blog (original) (raw)
Boldly Going Where No Science Has Gone Before
Posted on March 26th, 2021 by Dr. Francis Collins
It was an amazing experience to touch base once again with Kate Rubins, a NASA astronaut aboard the International Space Station. Connecting via live downlink on March 26, 2021, we discussed how space-based research can enable valuable biomedical advances on our planet. For example, over the past five years, NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences has funded a series of tissue chip payloads that have launched to the orbiting laboratory. Rubins, who is a biologist and infectious disease expert, has facilitated three of these projects: Cardinal Heart from Stanford University, Electrical Stimulation of Human Myocytes in Microgravity from the University of Florida, and Cartilage-Bone-Synovium from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Posted In: Director's Album, Director's Album - Photos
Tags: astronaut, bones, cartilage, gravity, heart, International Space Station, Kate Rubins, microgravity, muscle, NASA, space, synovial fluid, tissue chips
Cool Videos: The Ghost in the Lab Dish?
Posted on October 26th, 2017 by Dr. Francis Collins
As Halloween approaches, lots of kids and kids-at-heart will be watching out for ghosts and goblins. So, to help meet the seasonal demand for scary visuals, I’d like to share this award-winning image that’s been packaged into a brief video.
The “ghoul” you see above is no fleeting apparition: it’s a mouse cell labelled to reveal its microtubules, which are dynamic filaments involved in cellular structure, transport, and motility. Graduate student Victor DeBarros captured this image a couple of years ago in the NIH-supported lab of Randall Duncan at the University of Delaware, Newark, as part of research on the rare skeletal disorder metatropic dysplasia (MD).
Posted In: Health, Science, Video
Tags: art, Bone, cartilage, chondrocytes, Halloween, metatropic dysplasia, microtubules, musculoskeletal disorder, rare disease, skeletal disoder, translational science, TRPV4, University of Delaware Science as Art
Snapshots of Life: Picturing the Developing Windpipe
Posted on February 2nd, 2017 by Dr. Francis Collins
Randee Young and Xin Sun, University of Wisconsin–Madison
The image above shows a small section of the trachea, or windpipe, of a developing mouse. Although it’s only about the diameter of a pinhead at this stage of development, the mouse trachea has a lot in common structurally with the much wider and longer human trachea. Both develop from a precisely engineered balance between the flexibility of smooth muscle and the supportive strength and durability of cartilage.
Here you can catch a glimpse of this balance. C-rings of cartilage (red) wrap around the back of the trachea, providing the support needed to keep its tube open during breathing. Attached to the ends of the rings are dark shadowy bands of smooth muscles, which are connected to a web of nerves (green). The tension supplied by the muscle cells is essential for proper development of those neatly organized cartilage rings.
Tags: airways, cartilage, cartilage rings, congenital tracheomalacia, development, FASEB Bioart 2016, mineralized tissue, muscle, pulmonary disease, rare disease, respiratory system, smooth muscle, trachea, trachea development, upper airway, windpipe
Stem Cell Research: New Recipes for Regenerative Medicine
Posted on July 19th, 2016 by Dr. Francis Collins
Caption: From stem cells to bone. Human bone cell progenitors, derived from stem cells, were injected under the skin of mice and formed mineralized structures containing cartilage (1-2) and bone (3).
Credit: Loh KM and Chen A et al., 2016
To help people suffering from a wide array of injuries and degenerative diseases, scientists and bioengineers have long dreamed of creating new joints and organs using human stem cells. A major hurdle on the path to achieving this dream has been finding ways to steer stem cells into differentiating into all of the various types of cells needed to build these replacement parts in a fast, efficient manner.
Now, an NIH-funded team of researchers has reported important progress on this front. The researchers have identified for the first time the precise biochemical signals needed to spur human embryonic stem cells to produce 12 key types of cells, and to do so rapidly. With these biochemical “recipes” in hand, researchers say they should be able to generate pure populations of replacement cells in a matter of days, rather than the weeks or even months it currently takes. In fact, they have already demonstrated that their high-efficiency approach can be used to produce potentially therapeutic amounts of human bone, cartilage, and heart tissue within a very short time frame.
Tags: bioengineering, Bone, cartilage, development, embryonic stem cell, heart cells, human embryonic stem cell, mesoderm, muscle cells, regenerative medicine, replacement tissue, RNA sequencing, scoliosis, stem cell differentiation, stem cells, tissue engineering
Reprogramming Genes to Keep Joints Healthy
Posted on March 19th, 2013 by Dr. Francis Collins
![Caption: [Left] The knee joint of a normal mouse that endured an ACL-type injury. The injury triggered osteoarthritis and caused the cartilage on the femur (red) and tibia (green) to degrade, allowing the bones to sandwich together. [Right] This is the knee joint of a mouse that received gene therapy after the ACL injury. The cartilage is thick and healthy, and covers the bones completely, providing a cushion.](http://directorsblog.nih.gov/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/mouse-knee-joints.jpg)
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Credit: Brendan Lee and Zhechao Ruan, Department of Molecular and Human Genetics,
Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX
Our joints are pretty amazing marvels of engineering, but they don’t last forever. As we age, or if we suffer certain injuries, the smooth, slippery white cartilage covering the ends of our bones begins to fray and degrade. This causes osteoarthritis (OA), or ‘wear-and-tear’ arthritis. As the cartilage thins and disappears, the bones can even grow spurs that grate against each other, causing swelling and pain. It’s a major cause of disability, and there’s currently no cure—other than joint replacement, which is a pretty big deal and isn’t available for all joints. About 27 million Americans already have osteoarthritis; about 1 in 2 will suffer from some form of the disease over their lifetime. Those are lousy odds.
Tags: 'wear-and-tear' arthritis, ACL, anterior cruciate ligament, Baylor College of Medicine, bone spurs, bones, cartilage, children, degrade, engineered, gene therapy, horses, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, joint, lubricates, lubricin, mice, OA, osteoarthritis, pain, phase contrast-micro-CT, PRG4, proteoglycan 4, test, transfected cells