Scientists develop biophysical model to help better diagnose and treat osteoarthritis

Date:
February 14, 2022
Source:
Rochester Institute of Technology
Summary:
Scientists have teamed up to explore cartilage tissue's unique
properties with the hopes of improving osteoarthritis diagnosis
and treatment.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Scientists from Rochester Institute of Technology and Cornell University
have teamed up to explore cartilage tissue's unique properties with
the hopes of improving osteoarthritis diagnosis and treatment. The team published a new paper in Science Advances outlining their findings.


========================================================================== Cartilage tissue in our knee and elbow joints is just a few millimeters
thick but can bear loads up to 10 times the body's weight and withstand
a few hundred thousand loading cycles with minimal damage over a
person's lifespan. But the tissue does not regenerate once people reach adulthood, and damage to cartilage can be a precursor to diseases like osteoarthritis. RIT's biophysics modelers and Cornell's experimentalists examined what mechanically happens to cartilage tissue at the microscopic
level in response to shear to help drive advances in medical imaging.

"The goal was to find a mechanistic biophysics framework that can
make realistic predictions about what kind of changes are taking
place in cartilage mechanics and function during various disease
pathways," said Moumita Das, co- senior author of the paper and an
associate professor in RIT's School of Physics and Astronomy. "This mathematical model is informed by experimental data, so we can combine
it with noninvasive measurements like MRIs. With a map of properties
for healthy and damaged cartilage tissue, doctors can make predictions
about when surgical intervention is necessary just from imaging without
having to do invasive procedures." RIT Postdoctoral Research Associate Jonathan Michel served as co-lead author on the paper, and Pancy Lwin,
a mathematical modeling Ph.D. student from Myanmar, also served as a
co-author. Cornell's contributions were directed by Professor Professor
Itai Cohen and Professor Lawrence Bonassar.

The paper builds on another recent study the RIT-Cornell team published
in Soft Matter that looks at how cartilage's properties resist fracture
and how we can tune artificial materials to mimic those properties.

"As far as humanmade synthetic materials, nothing anyone has
come up with to date can compare to cartilage," said Das. "If we
can understand the origins of cartilage's robust and resilient
properties, it can help us engineer tissues to replace cartilage
or make other materials for applications such as soft robotics." ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
Rochester_Institute_of_Technology. Original written by Luke Auburn. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Thomas Wyse Jackson, Jonathan Michel, Pancy Lwin, Lisa A. Fortier,
Moumita Das, Lawrence J. Bonassar, Itai Cohen. Structural origins
of cartilage shear mechanics. Science Advances, 2022; 8 (6) DOI:
10.1126/ sciadv.abk2805 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220214154902.htm

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