Basic science

Effective Neovascularisation and Angiogenesis of new blood vessels is essentiell for healing process of injured tissue and regeneration after ischaemic events. Therefore recruting and migration of vessel-forming cells is the key mechanism for all regenerative systems. Aging and diseases, such as diabetes lead to significantly prolonged regeneration leading to insufficient wound repair, chronical wounds and the inability to recover after ischaemic events.

Therefore we want to explore the effect of aging on progenitor cells in skin, subcutaneous tissue, blood and bone marrow. Additionally we want to develop new biomaterials to reduce ischaemic effects on tissue. 

 Project Leader: Carolina Centeno M.Sc.

A frequent problem with Tissue Engineering scaffolds currently available is the delay in their vascularization, resulting in inadequate perfusion, and subsequent lack of specific cells, nutrients, and oxygen. Exploiting the photosynthesis process, our team developed the first generation of photosynthetic biomaterials, which in the presence of light decrease tissue hypoxia by the constant supply of photosynthetic oxygen (Hopfner et al., 2014; Schenck et al., 2015; Chávez et al., 2015), allowing tissue oxygenation in the absence of environmental or vascular oxygen supply.

Briefly, the strategy consists as follows:

^{Duscher et al. Gerontology 2016}

By usage of a new technique, a combination of Single-Cell-Expression Profiling and complex mathematic models we already showed, that aging leads to a significant depletion of stem cells. According to our opinion, the reason for this negative effect on neovascularisation is a result of depletion of specific subpopulations of progenitor cells. Normalization of these subpopulation has the ability to lead to improvement of cell-based therapie, age related complications and regeneration deficients. 

We want to further explore the effect of aging on composition of progenitor-cell population eciology in skin, subcutaneous tissue, blood and bone marrow. With the main focus on cutaneous wound healing and ischaemia we will analyze age related changes and the negative effect. Additionally, we have the aim to reverse these changes to enhance possibilities of autologous cell-based therapies.  Preliminary data suggests a normalization of tissue regeneration in aged animals, if certain progenitor cells get replaced. Based on hypothesis described above, we want to use this approach to enhance wound healing in aged patients and to lower ischaemic areals. 

Aging and Diabetes are highly associated with a whole breakdown of all kind of repair mechanism in human body. This results in a significant impairment of wound healing in these patients. Due to the recent focus of research on the regenerative potential, their function as potential autologous therapy option is undisputed. It has been described a decreased effect of these autologous therapies in aged and diabetic patients. As underlying mechanism a reduced functionality of ASCs in neovascularisation is suggested. In these study we want to enhance ASC-functionality by unsing small molecule drugs to reverse these pathologic conditions and restore the therapeutic options of autologous therapies in aged patients.