Researchers from the University of Washington have developed a way to use sound to create a cellular scaffold for tissue engineering, a novel approach that could help overcome regenerative medicine's prominent hindrances.

The development of a new method started accidentally as the team was initially studying boiling histotripsy, a method that utilizes millisecond-long bursts of high-intensity ultrasound waves to break apart tissue, as a technique to destroy cancerous growths by liquefying them with waves of ultrasound.

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After being destroyed by the sound, the tumors should eliminate the remnants of the cancerous tissues cellular waste. However, when the scientists looked at the "decellularized" tissues, they were shocked with what the process left intact.

"In some of our experiments, we discovered that some of the stromal tissue and vasculature was being left behind," said Yak-Nam Wang, a senior engineer at the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory. "So we had the idea about using this to decellularize tissues for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine."

The structure that remained after the tissues was identified as the extracellular matrix, the fibrous network that acts as a scaffold for the cells to grow upon.

The majority of techniques for decellularizing organs and tissues involve enzymatic and chemical treatments that can cause damage to the fibers and tissues and requires a number of days to finish. On the other hand, the team's histrostipsy method offers the possibility of quick decellularization of tissues with almost none to minimal damage to the cellular scaffolding.

"In tissue engineering, one of the holy grails is to develop biomimetic structures so that you can replace tissues with native tissue," Wang said. "Stripping away cells from already developed tissue could provide a good candidate for these structures, since the extracellular matrix already acts as the cellular framework for tissue systems."

TagsHistotripsy, Ultrasound, Tumor, Cancer, Extracellular matrix, Cells, Regenerative medicine