Research and development

Latest research 

The field of tissue and cell banking is rapidly expanding with clinical requirements regularly changing. Our research and development team is working on the improvement of existing processes and products and the development of innovative procedures and therapies. These include:

The development of advanced washing procedures to reduce the possibility of disease transmission and aid tissue incorporation

Tissue engineering to develop grafts, which can grow with the patient

New product development

We are committed to ensuring that our products and processes are state of the art, by rapidly incorporating new scientific developments and technologies into routine practices. The purpose of this is to make sure that the grafts that we supply are safe and the highest possible quality. We achieve this by working closely with leading academic researchers, surgeons and other international tissue banking organisations.

Tissue Engineering

New developments in tissue processing technologies and cell biology have the potential to revolutionise the ways diseased or damaged tissue can be repaired or replaced. This can be seen particularly in the field of regenerative medicine (or 'Tissue Engineering').

These technologies aim to create new types of graft, which will overcome many of the drawbacks of traditional tissue replacement therapies.

For example, by application of chemical and physical treatments, tissue allografts can be denuded of donor cells to create a clean, sterile and minimally immunogenic scaffold. 

These scaffolds can either be:

1. Implanted directly into a patient, where they are repopulated with the patients cells much faster than traditional allografts

Or,

2. Combined with cells from allogeniec or autologous donors in vitro to make living tissue equivalents - with the biological and biomechanical properties similar to those of the patient's own tissue

These protocols can be used to improve existing types of tissue graft, or prepare entirely new types of graft. For example, it’s been established that bone allografts that are processed to remove blood and marrow are less immunogenic. Which means recipients incorporate them much more efficiently than unprocessed grafts.

This process has been routinely applied to all our supplied shaped bone grafts for many years, and is continually being developed and refined to make it more efficient. It is also intended that the cleaned and marrow depleted matrices thus prepared will be used as scaffolds. To be reseeded ex vivo with a patients' own cells to create a living bone graft for re-implantation.