A Duke University professor has been awarded $500,000 to research new osteoarthritis treatments.
Dr. Farshid Guilak, a professor of orthopedic surgery at Duke’s School of Medicine, will use the award from the the Arthritis Foundation to investigate the biomechanical factors in the onset and progression of osteoarthritis. He will also research new drug and stem cell therapies for the disease.
This Arthritis Foundation grant, $100,000 a year for five years, will fund funding Guilak’s osteoarthritis research at the School of Medicine. Guilak’s work encompasses genome editing, gene therapy, synthetic biology. He will apply those approaches to the arthritis research.
“By combining these techniques, we now have the ability to modify the genome of the cell in a way that will let us engineer completely new biological therapies for arthritis,” Guilak said in a statement.
Guilak has already show in previous laboratory research a way to create an unlimited supply of stem cells that can turn into cartilage. That research, conducted in mouse studies, is important because cartilage has no ability to regenerate by itself. Guilak now plans to apply the technique to human cells.
“The advantage of this technique is that we can grow a continuous supply of cartilage in a dish,” Guilak said.
But the work requires more research in larger animals before it can even be tested in humans so applications of the technology as a human treatment are years away.
