Health Engineering

Biomedical Engineering

Coordinator: Prof. Inge Holsbeeks, inge.holsbeeks@groupt.be

The need for tissues or tissue constructs in novel regenerative medicine applications is one of the big challenges in health care. Complex healing strategies with improved healing and shortening recovering period are upcoming and often make use of cell or tissue based constructs. Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine are interdisciplinary fields that apply principles of engineering and life sciences to develop biological substitutes, typically composed of biological and synthetic components, that restore, maintain or improve tissue function. In addition tissue engineered constructs can be used in advanced drug testing and in vitro screenings.

One of the research areas of Health Engineering focuses on skeletal tissue engineering. We have close collaboration with Prometheus, the division of Skeletal Tissue Engineering of the KU Leuven, an interdisciplinary initiative focusing on skeletal tissue engineering (TE) research and technology transfer. We are the Prometheus research partner with focus the implementation of bioreactor for bone tissue engineering. Visit the Prometeus webpages.

Different types of bioreactors are used in our research. The Prometheus in-house developed perfusion bioreactor is currently used for proliferation and differentiation of human periosteal derived cells on different types of titanium scaffolds. Automated sampling, programmable perfusion are possible and in-line monitoring of pH and oxygen are integrated in this bioreactor. This bioreactor research focuses on the preclinical validation in terms of consistency, potency and safety. In addition these results will lead to further optimization of a next generation bioreactor.

More information about this research area:

• Team and Publications
• Projects