Bone Regeneration

Bone repair, especially large-scale repair requiring bone grafting (trauma, cleft palate), is challenging due to multiple cell types required to work together in a spatiotemporal manner. Promising strategies for bone repair involve the use of biomaterials; however, these are often met with challenges when repairing large defect spaces. Balancing the material to provide host bone repair and the biomolecular signals to direct cell fate towards repair remains a problem. Extracellular vesicles (EV) are stable sources of signaling cargo resilient to 3D-printing, making them ideal signals to be captured within biomaterials for bone repair. As the bone microenvironment is a complex signaling network of blood vessel formation, bone formation, bone resorption, and the immune response, we incorporate this complexity into a biomaterial platform with diverse populations of EV to guide host bone repair.