NAKFI Smart Prosthetics and Complex Systems Grantee
Sarah Heilshorn, Stanford University
Sarah Heilshorn, who attended the NAKFI conferences on Smart Prosthetics and Complex Systems and received seed grants both years, is an Assistant Professor in Materials Science & Engineering at Stanford University. The goal of her Smart Prosthetics seed grant was to design a new biomaterial that can promote regeneration of the central nervous system. Unlike traditional biomaterials, which often degrade over time at a constant pre-determined rate, this new biomaterial undergoes degradation only after the tissue has begun to heal. By mimicking the natural biochemical strategy that the body uses to biodegrade a scab once the tissue underneath has been repaired, the Heilshorn lab was able to create a material that is remodeled and degraded directly by the regenerating nerves. This strategy may be especially important for the development of spinal cord injury treatments, where there is expected to be large patient-to-patient variation in potential healing times. In 2009, Prof. Heilshorn was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to expand her work on this project. The next goal of the Heilshorn laboratory is to further optimize the biomaterial to release several neuroprotective drugs during degradation. They hypothesize that this combination of tissue-responsive biomaterial degradation and pharmaceutical drug release will provide even greater encouragement for nerve regeneration in the spinal cord.
Sarah's work was published in the
July 31, 2009 issue of The Medical News.
