Mouthuy Group | Soft Tissue Engineering

Developing materials for soft tissue repair

Injuries of soft tissues such as tendons and ligaments represent a growing medical and economic burden. Surgical repair is commonly performed but failure rates are still significant despite improvements of the surgical techniques and tools. For example, 40% of shoulder tendons fail to heal within the first few months after surgery. This is due to the poor ability of those tissues to regenerate. Our strategy is to create materials that encourage the endogenous healing process using biophysical cues.  To achieve this, we mainly work with electrospinning, a relatively recent textile technology that allows us to mimic the extracellular matrix of tissues such as tendons and ligaments. Its combination with traditional textile methods (e.g. braiding) as well as with other manufacturing methods (e.g. 3D printing) can lead to a wide variety of materials with properties that can be tailored to a particular application.

Developing multiaxial dynamic bioreactors 

Bioreactors involving mechanical stimulation are central to the successful culture of tendon and ligament tissues in vitro. They also become increasingly important to test biomaterials prior to carrying out in vivo work. Our goal here is to propose new strategies to improve the physiological and clinical relevance of the mechanical stresses in bioreactor systems.