Reimagining eggshells and other everyday items to grow human tissues and organs

It can be quite cumbersome and expensive to develop new combinations of engineered materials and molecules that support the creation of artificial tissues outside of the human body.

But as humans go about our daily lives, there is a diverse range of natural and man-made materials that are overlooked in tissue engineering. Recent successes use materials like tofu, eggshells and paper for a range of therapies including conditions that involve our heart valves, bones, cartilage and nerves.

In the Camci-Unal Research Group one of our goals is to look at the items we see or throw out every day and reimagine how they might be useful for growing three-dimensional tissues in the lab that could later be transplanted into people.

For instance, eggshells might appear as just leftover waste after cooking an omelet. But in our lab, we repurpose eggshells to fabricate tissue templates, also known as scaffolds, that promote the growth of bone cells and help them harden faster. Eggshells have minerals that contain carbonate which is also present in the bone. Because some of the components of eggshell resemble bone, they can be used to make tissue templates that replicate the biology of these tissues.

We also use nontraditional and inexpensive materials like paper to help grow tissues. Using paper, we make origami-inspired scaffolds, also known as three-dimensional frames or templates, for repairing muscle, bone and cartilage.