It’s one thing to be able to recover from a stroke, the amputation of a limb or an organ transplant. It’s quite another to do so and retain one’s quality of life.

“We need to come up with better therapies to help these patients,” says Tatiana Segura, a professor of biomedical engineering who works on creating new biomaterials, including a gel that regrows tissue in damaged areas of the body and promotes wound healing.

Biomaterials are all around us. They are the bandages in our first-aid kit, the fillings in our teeth and the capsules that contain the medications we take.

Segura and her team are developing biomaterials that harness the body’s ability to heal, a process called endogenous repair and regeneration. These artificial materials can help create physical structures and send out biological cues that encourage surrounding cells to grow.

Segura is a co-inventor of Microporous Annealed Particle (MAP) technology, a flowable porous scaffolding for regenerative medicine. It is used by Tempo Therapeutics, a San Diego, Calif.-based tissue engineering and regenerative medicine company for which Segura is a scientific adviser.

Human Clinical Trials Underway

Last September, the company began human clinical trials to determine its ability to potentially regrow large volumes of surgically removed tissue from patients who underwent skin cancer surgery, thus allowing them to avoid the formation of disfiguring scars.

Her lab is entirely funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “I graduated my 20th Ph.D. student. Next year is going to be my 20th anniversary of being a professor. And this whole time, I've been NIH funded,” she says.

And without the funding? “It would mean that innovation in new therapeutic approaches would just not be available from us,” Segura says. “We'll have to rely on other countries for innovation.”

The biomaterials she is developing also can promote brain plasticity after a stroke. The biomaterials (in this case, a gel that is injected into the brain) stimulate blood vessel growth and suppress inflammation since inflammation results in scars and impedes regrowth of functional tissue. In this way, the treatment potentially limits the damage caused by strokes.

For patients, it might mean the difference between regaining their ability to speak or walk without assistance or being unable to fully function again, she says.

“When I first started this project back in the early 2000s, the brain was not considered to be something that you could even implant something in or promote to repair,” Segura says. “But we've learned that all tissues have the capacity to repair, and it's trying to figure out how you could make it do so, because the biology is there.”