Welcome to Ingenious Films, sharing the genius of bioengineering.
The bone in your body is a natural composite material.
It's strong, tough, and can even regenerate after injury,
but sometimes your body may need some help.
Bioengineers like Gifty are using their engineering skills
to develop bone regeneration technology.
I asked her what attracted her to bioengineering.
When I was in school, I really enjoyed physics
and I enjoyed maths, but I liked biology but not that much,
and so I felt I really want to do something that has a lot of maths
and that has a lot of physics, and I felt engineering was the way to go.
With biomedical engineering, it gave me the opportunity to add a bit of biology
but also know the engineering, and so for me, that was the best fit.
My area of research looks at how bone grows around orthopedic implants.
A bone implant is a small piece of material that is used to fill a gap
when there's an accident with bone.
Once you break your bone, the gold standard
is to take bone from one part of your body
and replace it in the other part of your body,
but the problem with that is that we don't always have that bone to replace it.
So with growing bone in the lab, we use scaffolds.
So scaffolds are temporary supports on which we grow the cells.
Bone is a composite material in that it's made up of two or more different substances.
So we have our protein side and we have our mineral side.
So the protein side is mostly collagen
and then the mineral side is mostly hydroxyapatite.
So with my research in trying to replace bone,
I use polymer to replace my collagen side of using polyurethane
and then I use hydroxyapatite, which is a ceramic-based product,
to replace the mineral phase of bone.
So we combine these two materials into a solution
and then we cast it with salts, the normal salts that we have at home.
So we cast it, we leave it to settle for a while
and then we wash away the salts
because the salt is able to dissolve in water.
So the area that was initially occupied by the salt will now become coarse.
And as you can see with this tiny, tiny bit, we have some holes in there.
So it's within these holes that we grow ourselves.
We can make our scaffold in any shape that we want.
It could be very nice and fluffy and stretchy, that is just the polyurethane,
or we can include a hydroxyapatite
and then we start to make it firmer and thicker and stronger.
We need to get our final properties of our scaffold
to be very similar to that of bone because we're trying to replace bone.
So we look at different ways that we can end up with something
that looks really, really close to bone.
So we can put our bone cells in there, get the cells to make their matrix
and finally put the implant in to see what happens between the implants
and the bone we have made in the lab.
What I like most about engineering
is the fact that you can take the understanding you have from science
and then use that to solve a real-life problem
so you're applying your understanding of science
to solve the problems, everyday problems.
That's what fascinates me about engineering.
