A Shanghai's hospital said it will become the first in the nation to use a novel tissue engineering technology to cultivate bone.

The program, which could eventually help accident and disease victims rebuild damaged bone, has received support from the Shanghai Science and Technology Commission.

Animal experiments will begin early next year at Shanghai Chest Hospital's Tissue Engineering Laboratory. If these tests are successful, the practice would go into clinical research and possible use in three to five years.

Experts said the "in-vivo bioreactor" process can cultivate large pieces of bone within six months.

Doctors usually have to insert titanium rods to support bone growth over large areas. For some patients, the rods have to be replaced after several years due to poor compatibility with their bodies.

"Tissue engineering allows the patient to grow his or her own bone from a biological scaffold with seed cells collected from the patient," said Dr. Tan Qiang, director of the laboratory.

Currently, the main method of tissue engineering is to cultivate tissue outside the body and later transplant it within. But many large-tissue transplants fail when they enter the body, due to its different environment and a lack of proper blood supply, he said.

The in-vivo bioreactor, on the other hand, puts the tissue-growth "scaffolding" inside the body and provides a blood supply using a "perfusion" system.

"We just remove the perfusion system after the patient's own blood supply grows into the scaffold," Tan said.

Local experts on tissue engineering said the novel technology may offer a new direction.

"Small bone, skin and cornea regenerated through tissue engineering have been introduced in clinical trials on human beings elsewhere in the world. We are also researching big-bone regeneration," said Dr Liu Wei, chief of a tissue engineering laboratory at Shanghai No.9 People's Hospital, which leads the study in China. "The in-vivo bioreactor is a new method, and we will closely follow its development."

Tan, who left Shanghai Chest Hospital for tissue engineering studies in Switzerland four years ago, has succeeded in an experiment in which a sheep in Switzerland grew new trachea tissue using the in-vivo bioreactor method last month.

He returned to China in September and established the local laboratory.

(Shanghai Daily October 20, 2008)