We had a great kick off to the annual VCU Musculoskeletal Collaboration Center (MC2) Research Day!! It was a fun meeting with lots of great talks and networking bringing together VCU BME and the VCU Orthopaedic Surgery Departments. Also, Congrats to Puetzer Lab PhD Student Kelly Ott for winning 1st place poster for her work exploring how to regenerate the ACL!

Anastasia and Reem did a fantastic job presenting their summer REU work today! The lab sure had a busy and productive summer!!

We are excited to share that we received a 5 year NIH R01 from NIAMS to explore the mechanotransduction pathways that regulate hierarchical collagen fiber formation!!!

Collagen fibers are the primary source of strength and function in tissue throughout the body, particularly in tendons, ligaments, and menisci. Cells organize these fibers hierarchically, assembling them from nm-wide fibrils, into larger fibers and fascicles, growing in size and strength with increasing mechanical demand. Injuries disrupt this organization, resulting in loss of function, pain, and decreased mobility. Unfortunately, these collagen fibers do not regenerate after injury, nor in engineered replacements, creating a lack of repair options for torn tendons, ligaments, and menisci. Our long-term goal is to understand how cells regulate this  fiber formation so to engineer functional replacements and drive repair in vivo after injury. As a step toward this goal, this grant will  explore how mechanical cues transmitted via cellular contraction and stretch-activated ion channels regulate ligament fibroblast's development of hierarchical fibers.  In particularly, we will be exploring how cellular sensing via FAK, TRPV4, and Piezo1 regulate tissue maturation at the fibril, fiber, and fascicle length-scale. Special thanks to the students that have made this grant possible with all their excellent preliminary work and our collaborators, Drs. Rene Olivares-Navarrete and Hank Donahue!

Congratulations to Rudav for being awarded a VCU Undergraduate Fellowship from the VCU Center for Clinical and Translational Research (CCTR), for his work investigating cell localization in ligament-to-bone enthesis engineering. Using a novel culture system we have previously shown to drive zonal enthesis tissue formation, Rudav is investigating whether ligament fibroblasts seeded into out culture system localize to specific zones of the enthesis, or whether the tensile-compressive culture environment drives their differentiation. Congrats Rudav!

Congratulations to current Puetzer Lab PhD student Leia Troop and former lab undergraduate Madison Bates for being awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowships!!  The NSF GRFP awards exceptional graduate students with 3 years stipend and tuition coverage to advance their studies in STEM-based disciplines. Leia will be continuing her research evaluating how cyclic tensile loading drives  hierarchical fiber maturation and LOX crosslinking in engineered ligaments.  Madison is currently a PhD student at Vanderbilt University in Dr. Cynthia Reinhart-King's lab. Congrats Leia and Madison!!!