In a car wreck, the dashboard crushes the driver's knees and takes a divot out of his cartilage. Or, on a battlefield, shrapnel tears flesh from a soldier's face and a slice from the cornea of his eye.
Surgeons will do their best to repair these injuries. But bioengineers are working toward a future in which a combination of surgery and new materials will coax stem cells and the body's own repair mechanisms to regenerate tissues that trauma has taken away.
Among those in the forefront of the research is Jennifer Elisseeff, an associate professor in the biomedical engineering department at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Speaking this week at the 2009 World Stem Cell Summit in Baltimore, Elisseeff described how she and her colleagues have guided stem cells to patch up patients' damaged and deteriorating knee cartilage.
"And their function is better," she said. "They might not be star athletes, but they can go out and do something like playing doubles tennis," which their injuries had made impossible before treatment.
Stem cell research is poised for more such significant advances now that the Obama administration has lifted Bush-era restrictions on federal funding of research using new lines of stem cells derived from human embryos.
Maryland labs also compete for significant state funding. While appropriations from Annapolis have been smaller than originally proposed, the Maryland Technology Development Corp. signed a cooperative agreement this week with California that is designed to encourage scientific collaboration between researchers in the two states. California has the richest stem cell funding program in the world.
Elisseeff's lab is also working to perfect technologies that will enable stem cells to reconstruct fat and muscle lost to surgery or trauma. And researchers there are testing a sort of contact lens that can guide the patient's own stem cells to rebuild a damaged cornea.
It is hopeful evidence that after years of promises from stem cell pioneers, researchers might be getting closer to practical applications.
"People are working on the basic science of things and trying to understand how tissue develops but also at the same time developing practical technologies that can be used in the clinic today," Elisseeff said.
Directing stem cells
