Engineers at Georgia Tech have used skin cells to create artificial bones that mimic the ability of natural bone to blend into other tissues such as tendons or ligaments. The artificial bones display a gradual change from bone to softer tissue rather than the sudden shift of previously developed artificial tissue, providing better integration with the body and allowing them to handle weight more successfully.They created the tissue by coating a three-dimensional polymer scaffold with a gene delivery vehicle that encodes a transcription factor known as Runx2. They generated a high concentration of Runx2 at one end of the scaffold and decreased that amount until they ended up with no transcription factor on the other end, resulting in a precisely controlled spatial gradient of Runx2. After that, they seeded skin fibroblasts uniformly onto the scaffold.
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