Tag Archives: cartilage (hyaline)

Graphene foam with electrical feedthroughs could eliminate the need for joint replacement and offer better treatment for joint diseases

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I wish I had information about who to credit for this image,

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A June 24, 2025 news item on StatNano announces some new work on the use of graphene foam for regenerative joint medicine,

Boise State University researchers have developed a new technique and platform to communicate with cells and help drive them towards cartilage formation.

Their work leverages a 3-dimensional biocompatible form of carbon known as graphene foam and is featured on a cover for the American Chemical Society’s Applied Materials and Interfaces – – an interdisciplinary journal for chemists, engineers, physicists and biologists to report on how newly discovered materials and interfacial processes can be leveraged for a wide range of applications.

In this work, the researchers aim to develop new techniques and materials that can hopefully lead to new treatments for osteoarthritis through tissue engineering. Osteoarthritis is driven by the irreversible degradation of hyaline cartilage in the joints which eventually leads to pain and disability with complete joint replacement being the standard clinical treatment. Using custom designed and 3D printed bioreactors with electrical feedthroughs, they were able to deliver brief daily electrical impulses to cells being cultured on 3D graphene foam.

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A June 4, 2025 Boise State University College of Engineering news release on EurekAlert (also on Graphene-info but published on June 7, 2025), which originated the news item, provides more technical detail,

The researchers discovered that applying direct electrical stimulation to ATDC5 cells adhered to the 3D graphene foam bioscaffolds significantly strengthens their mechanical properties and improves cell growth – key metrics for achieving lab grown cartilage. ATDC5 cells are a murine chondrogenic progenitor cell line well studied as a model for cartilage tissue engineering. Additionally, their specialized setup allowed full submersion of the 3D graphene foam scaffold, enhancing cell attachment and integration within its porous structure – highlighting a promising approach for improving engineered tissues using electrical stimulus through conductive biomaterials.

 “One of the biggest challenges in applying direct electrical stimulation to stem cells is achieving repeatable delivery while monitoring the electrical environment and mapping that back to specific cellular responses,” said Mone’t Sawyer, lead author of the study. “Our system introduces a modular and scalable platform that enables high-throughput, scaffold-coupled electrical stimulation with precise control—opening new possibilities for understanding how electrical cues influence tissue formation.” 

Osteoarthritis ranks as a world-leading cause of pain and disability, currently affecting over 595 million individuals—more than double the 256 million afflicted individuals recorded in 1990. The economic burden is large, with global costs exceeding $460 billion annually, including healthcare expenses, lost productivity, and disability-related costs. In the U.S. alone, OA accounts for $65 billion in direct and indirect costs, with over 1 million joint replacements performed each year to manage severe cases. 

“Mone’t’s work is providing new fundamental insights into the role of materials and electrical stimuli in communicating with stem cells,” said Prof. David Estrada of the Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering. “I believe this work is setting the stage for greater understanding of the human electrobiome, that is, the role of electric charge and transport across different length scales and ultimately in cell fate to tissue function.”

This works was supported by the National Science Foundation through CAREER award #1848516 and the LSAMP Bridge to Doctorate Program under award #1906160. The researchers now plan to test their experimental setup with human stem cells in order to move one step closer to clinical applications.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Direct Scaffold-Coupled Electrical Stimulation of Chondrogenic Progenitor Cells through Graphene Foam Bioscaffolds to Control the Mechanical Properties of Graphene Foam–Cell Composites by Mone’t Sawyer, Amevi Semodji, Olivia Nielson, Attila Rektor, Hailey Burgoyne, Michael Eppel, Josh Eixenberger, Raquel Montenegro-Brown, Miranda L. Nelson, Trevor J. Lujan, David Estrada. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces 2025, 17, 26, 37404–37420 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.5c02628 Published May 20, 2025 Copyright © 2025 The Authors. Creative Commons Licence: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 .

This paper is open access.

Researchers from Boise State University have been quite interested in this area of regenerative medicine for some time, e. g., I found this July 8, 2018 news item titled “Graphene foam to potentially offer better treatment for joint diseases and eliminate the need for joint replacement.”

Seeing signs of osteoarthritis before joint replacements necessary

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A November 29, 2024 Canadian Light Source (CLS) news release (also received via email) by Brian Owens describes research that could benefit people who don’t know they have the beginning signs of osteoarthritis,

An imaging technique currently available only at synchrotrons like the Canadian Light Source at the University of Saskatchewan (USask) could one day enable doctors to detect osteoarthritis while patients can still be treated with medication – before they require joint replacement — thanks to research by USask scientist Brian Eames and colleagues.

In a pair of studies, Eames, a professor of Anatomy, Physiology, and Pharmacology in the USask College of Medicine, found that phase contrast imaging (PCI) detects very subtle changes in cartilage. He says the technique, which takes advantage of the high-energy light produced by the synchrotron, provides “fantastic” imaging of cartilage.

In the most recent study, Eames and colleagues (Daniel Chen, College of Engineering; Ali Honoramooz, Western College of Veterinary Medicine; Bill Dust, College of Medicine; and PhD student Hamed Alizadeh) used PCI to determine how well 3D-bioprinted cartilage could repair damaged joints. They compared the performance of cells impregnated in two different materials – one a squishy material called hydrogel and the other a hybrid construct combining hydrogel with a stiff plastic material. They hypothesized that the hybrid construct would shield the cells from forces in the recovering joint, so that the proper type of cartilage (hyaline) could form.

When they implanted these materials into animal joints, the researchers found that both helped new cartilage form, with the hydrogel doing slightly better by some measures. The hybrid, however, had one advantage: It formed less fibrocartilage, which was consistent with the team’s hypothesis. Fibrocartilage is a tougher form of cartilage that is created when joints are under stress. Having less fibrocartilage provides better joint function.

In an earlier study, Eames found that the superior resolution of PCI enabled more precise mapping of the articular cartilage surface than MRI – currently the “go to” imaging technique for osteoarthritis

Eames says that, while both sets of results are interesting, he’s more excited about the potential they hint at for bringing PCI into the clinical setting. PCI’s precision and ability to detect subtle changes “might be able to increase the ability to detect osteoarthritis earlier than regular clinical monitoring,” giving doctors more options for early treatment and researchers potential new targets for drug development.

While a football-field-sized synchrotron will never be a standard part of a hospital imaging suite, Eames says some companies are already working on ways to adapt the technology to make it portable for clinical use.

“The [CLS] is a nice test case for the technology that others can try to adapt for clinical use in humans,” he says.

Eames is seen discussing the work in this video,

Here are links to both papers mentioned in the news release, with the most recent work being first,

Comparison study on hyaline cartilage versus fibrocartilage formation in a pig model by using 3D-bioprinted hydrogel and hybrid constructs by Hamed Alizadeh Sardroud, Gustavo Dos Santos Rosa, William Dust, Tat-Chuan Cham, Gwen Roy, Sarah Bater, Alan Chicoine, Ali Honaramooz, Xiongbiao Chen and B Frank Eames. Biofabrication, 015014 Volume 17, Number 1 DOI 10.1088/1758-5090/ad88a6 Published 5 November 2024 • © 2024 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd

This paper is open access.

MRI overestimates articular cartilage thickness and volume compared to synchrotron radiation phase-contrast imaging by Suranjan Bairagi, Mohammad-Amin Abdollahifar, Oghenevwogaga J. Atake, William Dust, Sheldon Wiebe, George Belev, L. Dean Chapman, M. Adam Webb, Ning Zhu, David M. L. Cooper, B. Frank Eames. PLOS DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291757 Published: October 3, 2023

This paper is open access.