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C E L E B R A T I N G 1 0 0 Y E A R S O F W A K E F O R E S T ’ s S T U D E N T N E W S P A P E R VOL. 100, NO. 7
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A Department of Defense grant funds for new clinical trial Wake Forest researchers are studying injuries women could s ustain i n c ombat BY AMANDA ULRICH Staff Writer ulriac12@wfu.edu
Though 3D printing live tissue is not a new idea — the project started about 12 years ago — but Atala and his team overcame one of the biggest obstacles in the process: printing tissue that can survive outside the body. “Nature has given us a challenge which is about two tenths of a millimeter,” Atala said. “That’s the maximum distance from which cells will survive without nutrition.” That is a challenge that Atala and his team overcame. According to Atala, when printed tissue is implanted in the body, blood vessels will connect themselves to the tissue, but in the meantime while the vessels are growing, the tissue needs another source of nutrition. “We overcame that challenge by printing micro-channels in the structure,” Atala
Lead researchers at Wake Forest are embarking on a new clinical trial, which will include student participants, to examine the effects of strength training in preventing overuse injuries for female runners. The Department of Defense funded the $1.6 million project, called STARS (Strength Training and Running Study), in the hopes that more women in the military would be able to complete basic training without getting injured. Research from the U.S. Military Academy shows that female soldiers suffer small overuse injuries at more than twice the rate than their male counterparts do. “There needs to be a public health benefit for any study, and this definitely qualifies,” said Joseph Seay, a biomechanist for the Military Performance Division of the US Army and co-investigator for the trial. “Whether they’re going into the military or not, women run and women are getting injured, which makes this research important.” This study is coming at a critical time. Last month, the defense department announced that all combat roles will now be open to women in the military for the first time. This decision means that women will now be eligible for about 220,000 new jobs. While the STARS trial was created partly because of these new military jobs, researchers in the health and exercise department at Wake Forest also wanted to find out generally why so many women were getting injured while running. Steve Messier, a professor in the HES department and lead investigator for STARS, started to notice an alarming trend through some of his previous research. After recently completing another study on overuse injuries, called TRAILS (The Runners and Injury Longitudinal Study), Messier found that women were suffering from overuse injuries at a much higher rate than men. “Women naturally have less muscle mass, so they’re weaker than their male counterparts,” Messier said. “This seemed like the logical first step to examine whether increase in strength, or things like balance exercises, would make a difference in lessening injuries.” Increasing strength training exercises
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Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center recently made a break-through in 3D printing live tissue. Their research was published on Feb. 15 in Nature Biotechnology.
WFUBMC 3D prints live tissue A team of scientists from WFUBMC recently made a breakthrough in bio-‐printing BY CHRIS CASWELL News Editor caswck14@wfu.edu Within the last few years, 3D printers have gained national attention as their potential uses continue to increase. Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center (WFUBMC) are adding to that list after they recently proved that printing live tissue to replace injured tissue in patients is possible. “We take a very small piece of tissue from the patient, one half the size of a postage stamp,” said Anthony Atala direc-
tor of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. “We basically harvest the cells and allow them to expand outside the body on culture plates where they replicate. And a few weeks later, we then have enough cells to create new tissue, so we then place these cells in printing cartridges and lay down the cells to print tissue.” Atala further explained how this revolutionary technology could be used practically for a large range of injuries. “If we do have a patient that has an injury, we can do an x-ray of the injured site,” Atala said. “We can transfer the data from that x-ray to our software program [which sends it] to the printer and drives the printer to create a structure that fits that patient’s defect.” Atala and co-authors Hyun-Wook Kang, Sang Jin Lee, In Kap Ko, Carlos Kengla and James J Yoo published the research in an article in Nature Biotechnology.