HIPPOCRATES aims to provide new tissue engineering technologies for therapeutic treatments, which will ultimately have a major social impact by contributing to the challenge of providing lifelong health for our society at an affordable cost.

 

The main aim of the proposed project is to combat and overcome fragmentation of European Research on the field of Tissue Engineering of Bone and Cartilage, including providing solutions for osteochondral defects. HIPPOCRATES brings together some European leading academic centers and several complementary industrial players in a multi-disciplinary consortium for conducting research to compete in the international arena, namely with USA and Japan.

This project aims to provide new tissue engineering technologies for therapeutic treatments, which will ultimately have a major social impact by contributing to the challenge of providing lifelong health for our society at an affordable cost.

Tissue engineering has emerged in the last decade of the 20^th century as an alternative approach to circumvent limitations in the current therapies for organ failure or replacement, which are mainly related with the difficulty of obtaining tissues or organs for transplantation. Conventional material technology has resulted in clear improvements in the field of regeneration/substitution medicine. However, despite the good results with the current methodologies, due to their severity, most of these injuries are still unrecoverable, creating a major health care problem worldwide. In this context the aim of HIPPOCRATES is to establish Europe as the international scientific leader within the area of tissue engineering of bone and cartilage.

The scientific aim of the project is the development of advanced functional materials that are needed for improved quality of life of thousands of patients suffering from cartilage or bone tissue loss or malfunctioning. The improved therapy suggested herein will result in a decreased morbidity and mortality of patients with reduction of the overall costs in European healthcare systems. This is particularly relevant if we take into account the increasing ageing of the population in Europe together with the increasing life expectancy, which led to a tremendous growth of age-related problems (eg. osteoporosis).

Main motivations in HIPPOCRATES are the integration and development of the know-how required in the field of tissue engineering and regeneration. The scientific and technical workplan of this project is clearly oriented by the development of tissue engineering products that can be used for a bone, cartilage or an osteochondral tissue engineering strategy.

Two main types of innovative scaffolds will be used for bone and cartilage applications: ceramic (bi-phasic calcium-phosphate) scaffolds obtained from mineralized red algae and polymeric scaffolds also of natural origin, mainly based on chitin/chitosan, starch and protein based polymers. For the osteochondral approach, specific technologies are to be developed to produce complex bi-material (polymer/ceramic) constructs.

For achieving the appropriate scaffold structures, an all range of adequate processing techniques to obtained suitable scaffolds to be used on cartilage, bone and osteochondral tissue engineering are in use. One of the main innovations will be the development and use of specific software packages for designing patient specific scaffolds that will be combined with the production of the scaffolds by means of 3D plotting methodologies. Also included are melt based processing (extrusion and injection molding with blowing agents) and solvent-based techniques.

The scaffolds will also be loaded with a range of growth factors, including several bone-morphogenetic proteins (BMPs), other growth factors in the TGF-b family as well as some angiogenic factors.

Primary cells and progenitor cells obtained from animals and later on from human patients will be used to develop the tissue-engineered products. Cell culturing methodologies will be optimized and specific real-time ways of controlling the cultures evolution into the desired phenotypes will be developed. In-vivo functionality assessment experiments will also be carried out.