Victoria Muir
University of Delaware, DE·Biomedical Engineering
Lower back pain is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and much of it traces to degeneration of the intervertebral disc, the cushion between vertebrae that lets the spine bend and carry load. Testing new disc therapies is slow and expensive: large animal models are the gold standard but costly and not always a good match for human biology, while flat cell cultures miss the disc's mechanics.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Materials Science
Engineering
- Topics
intervertebral disc
degenerative disc disease
lower back pain
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2031
What they work on
- Design bioprinted intervertebral disc constructs built from bacterial cellulose synthesized in situ by matrix-producing microbes patterned within degradable microporous hydrogels.
- Anchor the bioprinted disc constructs to biomineral scaffolds produced by microbes to assemble a complete spinal motion segment research model with relevant biomechanics.
- Evaluate injectable hydrogel therapies for disc degeneration in the biosynthesized constructs as a low-cost, high-throughput, scalable alternative to large animal testing.
- Determine how bioprinting parameters and spatial deposition of microbe-laden inks reproduce the layered architecture and mechanical loading behavior of the native disc.
More about the research
This project builds a laboratory stand-in for a spinal motion segment that is cheap enough to use in large numbers and mechanically realistic enough to be meaningful.
Why it matters
Degenerative disc disease and chronic low back pain affect millions of Americans and drive major healthcare costs, yet existing options such as spinal fusion and disc replacement leave room for improvement in long-term and biomechanical outcomes. A cheap, high-throughput, mechanically relevant in vitro disc model could let many more candidate injectable therapies be screened before animal studies, potentially speeding development of better treatments.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Seunghyun Sim
University of California-Irvine, CA·Chemistry·Early-career
Build a high-throughput screen for enzyme activity using fluorescence-activated cell sorting, an instrument that sorts single particles by brightness, together with engineered chemical probes that fluoresce only when the displayed enzyme turns over its substrate.
Ibrahim Ozbolat
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Biomedical Engineering
Test whether vascular micropuncture, making tiny needle holes in the sagittal sinus vein, speeds vascularization of skull defects in rats, measured with laser Doppler, angiography and immunohistochemistry.
The school
University of Delaware: 22 labs on PI Pages, $466M a year on research, 298 research doctorates a year.
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