Creating artificial bones

Facilitator: Professor Bruce Milthorpe, you are not only the Dean of Science at UTS but I also understand that you have extensive research background in the use and modification of materials as bio materials. What does that mean?

Interviewee: Well that means using materials, they may be artificial ones, manmade ones, or probably even better, naturally occurring materials which we treat, alter, either wash or use chemically which we then use to re-implant in the body. Either to make the body grow its own tissue again, well that's the basis of tissue engineering, or we might even use them for permanent replacement as maybe happens at the moment with hips and knees.

Facilitator: What kind of naturally occurring materials are we talking about?

Interviewee: Well we're talking about collagens which tend to come from an animal origin or more recently we're looking at sponges and corals which are much earlier in evolution's history. Because of the conserve nature of the sorts of proteins that make these matrix materials up in which the cells live, we're hoping that we can maybe get something that's a bit more neutral so it doesn't already have an association with a particular type of tissue. Then modify that so that we can actually engineer what the cell sees.

Facilitator: So what are you specifically researching?

Interviewee: Well my main area is in bone and cartilage research. So I'm interested in how to grow relatively large matters of bone or material that will actually be replaced by bone in the body. There are a number of conditions where people lose large amounts of bone, cancers of the long bones in particular and that's - or severe trauma and road accidents. Usually what happens if a lot of bone gets lost it can't be replaced and so a limb is amputated and that's a bad outcome really for the patient. If we could provide materials that a surgeon could take almost off the shelf and put back in, that would be a very significant advance.

Facilitator: How do you go about this research? What kind of equipment do you use?

Interviewee: We use everything from tissue - well from what's called tissue culture where we grow cells out in the lab, in flasks. So we use those cells as basically test beds for our materials, through pieces of equipment like mass spectrometers so we can use those to identify the sorts of proteins we want, identify what the cells are doing. Here, we're very lucky that we actually have a super resolution microscope, an optical microscope, so we can see what cells do, how they behave on these materials at resolutions of around about 100 nanometres in real time. That's an absolutely fantastic advance.

Facilitator: It's a pretty exciting piece of equipment I'm told.

Interviewee: Very exciting piece of equipment. We got the basic microscope just over a year and a half ago and we've just upgraded it now to do the real time work at the super resolution.

Facilitator: What value would that have?

Interviewee: Well that microscope cost us $1.5 million and yes it's a very significant amount of money but serious science requires big investment and the value of that is, of course, in the extra information and the value of that information that you get from it.

Facilitator: Going forward what are the biggest challenges that you face?

Interviewee: I suppose it really actually comes back to I think we are being rather arrogant. We tend to think that we can fool four billion years of evolution in a few short years of research and that's what tissue engineering is trying to do because we're trying to make the body do something that naturally it doesn't want to do. But we're actually going quite well at the moment so we might actually, at least get part - halfway there to absolutely fooling the body.

Facilitator: Well, Professor Bruce Milthorpe it sounds like as well as being the Dean of Science you have some enormous research challenges ahead and I can imagine your time is very precious. So thank you very, very much.

Interviewee: Well thank you but I enjoy my research, the small amount that I can do in amongst the administrative duties of being a Dean but also I'm blessed by having some really good colleagues who help me in this and it's actually the colleagues who make the research a joy, as well as the problems of course.

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