MechE Seminar Series: Michael Albro

Speaker: Michael Albro

Title: Raman and Growth Factors in the Diagnostics and Repair of Cartilage Injuries

Abstract: Injuries to articular cartilage represent some of the most challenging clinical cases for orthopaedic surgeons. Current cartilage repair strategies achieve only short-term clinical benefits due, in large part, to limitations in imaging modalities, which are unable to diagnose cartilage damage early, and limited tissue regeneration therapies, which fail to regenerate functional cartilage. In this talk, I will present the two interdisciplinary research thrusts of our lab to address this challenging clinical paradigm. In the first part of the talk, I will present our work on developing reaction-diffusion frameworks to describe the transport of growth-stimulating agents, or growth factors, in developing cartilage tissues. These models illustrate how cell-mediated chemical reactions (e.g., binding kinetics, receptor dynamics) play a unique beneficial role in regulating growth factor availability during native cartilage development, but alternatively incite growth factor transport limitatations during attempts to regenerate injured cartilage. This work highlights the central challenge of delivering growth factors in cartilage regenerative therapies and offers a novel path forward for designing next-generation, growth-factor-delivering biomaterials to improve clinical cartilage regeneration outcomes. In the second part of my talk, I will describe our group’s efforts to develop a Raman arthroscopic probe for clinical diagnostics of cartilage injuries. Raman spectroscopy is an inelastic optical light scattering technique that provides a non-destructive, quantitative optical fingerprint of a tissue. Through a series of ex vivo and in vivo models, my group has established the capability of Raman-probe-derived optical biomarkers to predict the composition and functional material properties of cartilage with a sensitivity far beyond standard-of-care imaging platforms. In the future, we envision Raman needle arthroscopy to serve as a transformative clinical tool to guide the implementation of surgical cartilage repair procedures and to monitor the tissue response to cartilage regenerative therapies.

About the Speaker: Prof. Michael Albro currently serves as Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Boston University (BU) with affiliations in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Division of Materials Science & Engineering, and Photonics Center. His musculoskeletal research group incorporates disciplines of biomechanics, biomaterials, and optics in order to develop novel diagnostics of synovial joint injuries and develop novel cartilage regeneration therapies. Prof. Albro received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and served as a Marie Curie International Fellow in the Stevens Group at Imperial College London. His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation, and Arthritis Foundation. He recently received the NSF CAREER Award and Dr. James R. Neff Research Award from MTF Biologics.