Research focus

Bone is a complex organ providing structural and mechanical support to our body, but also consisting in our principal hematopoietic centre. The formation of our bones is tightly and timely orchestrated, involving stages of cartilage, vasculature, bone and bone marrow establishment.

Bourgine lab aims at compiling human-specific knowledge on how these tissues form, interact and regenerate at an organ scale, toward the development of innovative regenerative therapies. Precisely, they exploit bone organogenesis as a paradigm to decipher the driving cellular and molecular mechanisms. Their interest extends towards the modeling of bone-developing cancers, through the personalized engineering of human mini-bones. Clinical implications of the research run from the repair of bone and cartilage defects, the expansion/differentiation of human blood cells for transplantation and the screening of drugs for blood cancer treatment.

Aims

Bourgine group has developed cutting edge in vitro and in vivo technologies exploited in the following contexts:

• Custom engineering of human extracellular matrices for skeletal tissue repair
• The in vitro engineering of bone marrow models in 3D culture systems
• Personalized development of human mini-bones as in vivo cancer modeling platform

Strengths of the group

Mesenchymal stem cells, hematopoietic stem cells, 3D culture systems, tissue engineering, bone regeneration, acute myeloid leukemia, humanized ossicles, confocal microscopy, flow cytometry, single cell omics

Impact

• Engineering of extracellular matrices as bone graft substitutes
• Personalized modeling of bone-developing cancers

| Research Output

Affiliations

• Wallenberg Center in Molecular Medicine
• Lund Stem Cell Center
• Dept of Clinical Sciences Lund

Social media

• Twitter
• Website: Laboratory for cell, tissue and organ engineering