Caballero Aguilar says that working alongside surgeons and other university researchers at the facility has had a major impact on her work.
“We complement each other. If I have doubt, we can discuss it and reshape the project as we go, which helps to reach a better outcome. At the end of the day, everyone is doing a bit of work in a big project. It feels very rewarding,” Caballero Aguilar said.
Caballero Aguilar’s stem cell work is part of two of the facility’s major research projects, one which focuses on repairing damaged muscle fibers and another regarding damaged cartilage regeneration; both are using advanced technologies, like bioprinting, to implant materials into the body, including the handheld 3D Biopen that allows surgeons to ‘draw’ biomaterials into a patient directly and has been successfully tested, using knee cartilage, on six sheep.
She is working to manipulate polymer materials into release mechanisms for stem cell growth factors, which would form part of the 3D bioink drawn into the body. Controlling the delivery of growth factors is very important – stem cells take at least six weeks to grow into tissue, so the growth factors need to be slowly released over the entire time period. Caballero Aguilar shakes an oil and water solution at an intense rate, which is called the emulsion method, to create microspheres, which are crosslinked to form a substance that’s able to hold the growth factors.
Swinburne Professor of Biomedical Electromaterials Science Simon Moulton, who is Caballero Aguilar’s supervisor, said that the success of her stem cell research project was helped along by “the opportunity to collaborate directly with orthopaedic surgeons and muscle specialists at St Vincent’s Hospital.”
Professor Moulton said, “Without this space, Lilith’s project would be a much smaller project without the translation benefit. It still would be great research done at a very high level, she would have publications and be able to graduate, but working in this collaborative environment, she can achieve all of that, while also having her research go into a clinical outcome that actually has benefit to patients.”
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[Source: Swinburne]