Dental Tissue Regeneration via Bioengineered Immune Modulatory Scaffolds (DREIMS)
Oral health plays an essential role in our daily lives and wellbeing. Yet, poor oral conditions are highly prevalent, affecting almost half the world’s population, with high socio-economic burden. Treatment of conditions affecting the dental root remains highly challenging. Moreover, dental root replacement with titanium implants may work for adult patients, yet in children such technique cannot be applied as an osseointegrated implant will not follow dentoalveolar growth. Therefore, replacing a lost permanent tooth in children is extremely challenging. In order to offer a viable solution for pediatric tooth loss, tissue engineering strategies utilizing combinations of scaffolds, growth factors, and stem cells, are currently in development. However, clinical success remains limited to small defects, and suffers from limited reproducibility. This project aims to develop a novel tissue engineering approach for dental root tissue replacement based on multi-material scaffolds with immunomodulatory properties.
Duration : 01/10/2023 – 30/09/2027
Funder : Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds – ID-N project
People involved: Annabel Braem
Partners: Department of Imaging & Pathology (KU Leuven), Department of Materials Engineering (KU Leuven), Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Transplantation (KU Leuven)