Issued patent
3D Mineralized Bone Constructs
An issued NASA patent from the Technology Transfer catalog.
About this technology
Overview
Innovators at NASA Johnson Space Center have developed a technique to grow 3D tissue constructs, similar to human bone, in a laboratory environment. Problems arise when studying both the normal state and pathophysiology of bone. As an organ system, it is slow growing, so the time to study and observe a response to a particular stimulus is relatively long. Our bioengineers have discovered that osteoblast and osteoclast cell types can be induced to aggregate into large spheroids in a specific spatial relationship under certain culture conditions when placed in a rotating-wall tissue-culture vessel (shown above). The ability to construct a 3D model of such mineralized tissue on-demand, using a co-culture of human cells that differentiate and spatially arrange themselves in a physiologically relevant manner, is a major step forward in how the process of bone formation and remodeling can be studied.