Author: Rosa Armitage

From the 10th to 14th July 2022, our team attended the 9th World Congress of Biomechanics in Taipei, Taiwan. From the first World Congress of Biomechanics held at La Jolla, California, the USA in 1990 the World Congress of Biomechanics has become the most prestigious forum for the exchange of new ideas, technologies, and novel findings in a broad spectrum of scales ranging from the molecular, cellular, tissue, and organ levels to the system-wide, as well as in basic research and clinical applications.

Leading our representation at the conference was Program 3 lead Prof Justin Cooper-White who delivered a plenary talk on ‘Mechano-intervention: Elucidating drives of stem cell date for enhanced and targeted tissue rejuvenation.’ Program 3 focuses on developing optimised Tissue-Engineered Scaffolds. This research program utilises multiscale computational models and simulation outputs along with detailed characterisation and mapping of shoulder joint biomechanics to inform the design, development, optimisation, and validation of engineered scaffolds for rotator cuff repair.

📣 Prof Lynne Bilston, Prof Syn Schmitt, Prof Paul Hodges also provided lectures with Dr Bart Bolsterlee, Prof Peter Pivonka, and Prof Lynne Bilston further acting as session moderators.

⭐ Congratulations to the Joint Biomechanics team with Mr Marco Branni, Miss Yilan (Olivia) Zhang, Ms Marine Launay, Dr Brandon Ziegenfuss, Adj. Prof. Ashish Gupta, Mr Corey Miller, Dr Bart Bolsterlee, Prof Peter Pivonka, and A/Prof Saulo Martelli in attendance to promote their research.

Last week our team had the opportunity to present their work at the 27th congress of the European Society for Biomechanics Congress #ESB2022, held between 27-29 June in Porto, Portugal.

Dr Dermot O’Rourke presented his work entitled ‘ Characterising the relationship between the knee bone geometry and passive kinematics’ and was fortunate to win an esteemed travel award for his outstanding presentation.

Affiliate PhD student and his Principal Supervisor, Centre Deputy Director, Prof. Peter Pivonka presented their work on ‘A Multiscale, mechanobiological model of cortical bone adaptation due to pth and mechanical loading,’ followed by another exemplary presentation from our program 2 lead Prof. Saulo Martelli on ‘ ‘The effect of microstructural anisotropy on load bearing capacity of the entire human femur.’

One of the highlights of the event was a table discussion hosted by our Centre’s Industry Partner Materialise on Tech Transfer (TT) in Biomechanics, a fundamental aspect of our centre as we strive to drive transformation in the orthopaedic industry through translational research. The talk provided very practical advice on the different stages of conveying results stemming from scientific and technological research to the marketplace and to wider society, along with associated skills and procedures,

After a few busy days of presentations, the team relaxed to enjoy the conference dinner and took up some of the greater sights from the Porto & the Douro Valley region.

We thank the conference organisers for the opportunity to showcase our research with our European counterparts.

On Thursday 16 June, the ARC Training Centre for Joint Biomechanics had the chance to take part in QUT (Queensland University of Technology) ‘Power of Engineering’ program.

The program is designed by QUT (Queensland University of Technology) for Year 7, 8 & 9 students to assist with their key decision-making to study STEM senior subjects. As part of the celebration of the International Women in Engineering Day 2022, QUT also offered industry experiences and a range of talks from current Engineering students, such as our PhD students enrolled at the centre to encourage discussion and networking with engineering staff. We were fortunate to host one session of the immersive daily program with 22 Year 9 students from Calamvale Community College visiting the Centre.

As part of their experience, they gained insight into the research happening at the centre; heard personal stories of where an engineering degree has taken some of our students, chief investigators, and industry colleagues; and saw some of the great lab spaces where our research takes place QUT Centre for Robotics.

On Thursday the 23rd of June, the official  International Women in Engineering Day,  we hosted a secondary session with more students visiting with talks from our very own centre manager Ms Maddie McIntyre and PhD students and affiliate researchers Dr Jing Peng, Miss Natali Uribe, and Ms Marine Launay who each spoke on their engineering journey and career story to date. It was wonderful to see our centre staff and researchers raise the profile of women in engineering and focus attention on the amazing career opportunities available to girls in this exciting industry.

We at the centre would like to thank all who volunteered their time to meet with the students and help inspire different conversations about engineering, career planning, and how you can make a difference through engineering and research.

On the 8th of June 2022, the inaugural IAB meeting was conducted  in person to discuss both the Centre progress to date and future directions.

The IAB is an independent advisory group established to provide objective expert advice and recommendations to the EC with regards to the Centre’s performance, strategic direction, research priorities and partnerships. Membership comprises of invited academic, clinical and industry experts in the field of orthopaedics, biomedical engineering, and medical technologies. Board Members are invited and appointed by the EC and Centre Director and are selected based on their experience within a key stakeholder group of the Centre and for their demonstrated ability to provide sound guidance on the research and general activities of the Centre.

The role of the Advisory Board is to review the Centre’s performance and make recommendations that assist with the achievement of the Centre’s strategic goals and in setting future strategic direction, including beyond the lifetime of the Centre. The Board is advised by the Centre Director and EC on strategy and progress. 

The output of the Board meeting included recommendations and key questions across several aspects of the Centre including: 

*Training & Employability of Centre Members 

*Centre Culture & Cohesiveness 

*Diversity of Stakeholder Engagement & Interactions 

*Performance Measures, and 

*Future Outlook

The output also included an overview of identified strengths, weaknesses, key opportunities, and potential threats of the Centre for the EC to review and consider. In conjunction with the outputs of the EC strategic planning day (April 2022), the IAB recommendations and summary have informed the creation of a Centre-funded Seed Grant program which is being piloted in 2022-2023. This strategically-funded initiative aims to directly foster collaboration between the early-career team members (HDRs and post-docs) and our industry partners to identify clinically-relevant research gaps and apply for funding to lead a 12 month multidisciplinary project. Training and development activities are incorporated into the application process to guide early-career team members through the grant application and project management processes.  

Overall at the centre, we are grateful to have a diverse range of clinical, academic, industry, and engagement experts, who will help steer our Centre to higher performance, plan for our next stages and network with our researchers with Prof. Karen Reynalds, Prof David Sonnabend, Dr Dimity Dornan AO, and Mr Peter Cooke. We know that the future direction of the centre is in safe hands with our leading experts on board.

For further information on their backgrounds, please refer to our website here.

On the 27th of April, we held our Executive Committee Strategic Planning Day. We were very fortunate to have held the day face to face, and to have one of our Program Leads, Prof Lynne Bilston finally be able to visit us from UNSW NeuRA (Neuroscience Research Australia)

Thank you to our Centre Manager, Maddie McIntyre McIntyre, who led the workshop sessions. We spent the day revisiting our Centre values and purpose; reviewing our strategic priorities; and planning the activities and initiatives to focus on for 2022.

One of the takeaways of the day was true commitment and need for collaboration from everyone. Our collaborative and innovative culture will allow us to significantly contribute to improved health outcomes, associated economic benefits, and train a highly skilled workforce equipped to continue advancing the field of joint biomechanics.

Thank you to everyone who took part (Adj. Prof. Ashish Gupta, Prof. Yuantong Gu, Dr Kenneth Cutbush, Prof. Graham Kerr, Prof. Justin Cooper-White, A/Prof.  Saulo Martelli, Dr Wolbert van den Hoorn, Mr Michael McArdle, Miss Sophia Power, and Prof. Peter Pivonka) we appreciated your time and contributions.

Members of the ITTC for Joint Biomechanics team had the exciting opportunity of presenting their work at the 27th Annual Conference Australasian Society for Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering held in Melbourne from Wednesday the 20^th of April to Friday the 22^nd of April.

Dr Eleonore Bolle presented her work on the ‘Establishment of an in vitro skin model to study bacterial infection around percutaneous devices’ as part of her work under Program 3 at the centre. Program 3 is dedicated to the multiscale computational models and simulation outputs and detailed characterisation and mapping of shoulder joint biomechanics to inform the design, development, optimisation, and validation of engineered scaffolds for rotator cuff repair.

Her talk brought insight to the use of percutaneous devices that are used to connect internal organs to external medical devices such as prosthesis, catheters and electrical drivelines in clinical practice. Such devices breach the skin’s natural barrier and thus create an entry point for pathogens, with the aim of her research to design novel implant surfaces that can better integrate with the skin to reduce bacterial infection, implant rejection, and ultimately improve patient healing quality and recovery times.

In her study of the same name published in the ‘Frontiers of Microbiology’; on 14 May 2020, Dr Bolle outlined her formative work on this topic where in vitro studies of Staphylococcus aureus, the most common cause of driveline-related infections, were used to infect mock drivelines of melt electrowriting (MEW) with smooth or porous un-seeded and porous pre-seeded with human fibroblasts, implanted with human skin grafts. She successfully demonstrated that infection largely occurs in micro-gaps caused by insufficient skin integration between the scaffold and the surrounding skin, which validated clinical reports of driveline infection pathways.

Dr Bolle additionally presented her poster on ‘Establishing the Role of Growth Factors Expressed in Healing Tendons in Inducting Stem Cell Tenogenesis,’ which highlighted her work over at the University of Queensland on developing tissue scaffolds.

On the last day of the conference our affiliate researcher, Dr Edmund Pickering, engaged the audience with his talk on ‘MEW tubular scaffolds with massively tailorable mechanical behaviour.’ Dr Pickering explained how MEW is currently being used to create tissue scaffolds and how their successful biological integration into patients comes down to their mechanical abilities and ability to match native tissue properties, whilst simultaneously supporting cell attachment and proliferation.

Dr Pickering’s talk highlighted the geometric properties of tubular crosshatch scaffolds using Finite Element (FE) modelling and demonstrated that mechanical behaviour is largely tunable through control of basic scaffold parameters of pore area and angle as tested under tension, compression, bending, and radial loading. His work is a huge step towards defining optimal scaffold design, particularly to assist us with our aims under program 3 to design patient scaffolds for rotator cuff tears.

With many emerging technologies and advancements in the field of tissue engineering, the team was absolutely delighted to share their findings thus far and to promote the centre’s research.

We thank the conference organisers for a warm welcome and look forward to the next conference in 2023.

References:

Bolle ECL, Verderosa AD, Dhouib R, Parker TJ, Fraser JF, Dargaville TR, Totsika M. (2020). An in vitro Reconstructed Human Skin Equivalent Model to Study the Role of Skin Integration Around Percutaneous Devices Against Bacterial Infection. Frontiers in Microbiology, 11 (670). doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2020.00670. PMID: 32477277; PMCID: PMC7240036.

Pickering, E., Paxton, N. C., Bo, A., O’Connell, B., King, M., & Woodruff, M. A. (2022). 3D printed tubular scaffolds with massively tailorable mechanical behavior. Advanced Engineering Materials, 24(11) doi:10.1002/adem.202200479

On the 4^th of April, Ms Monica Russell from our industry partner Materialise delivered the first centre workshop of the year, with a Mimics training course to our centre post-docs and PhD students.

The Materialise Mimics Innovation Suite is a advanced tool that our researches, particularly in Program 1, use to transform medical images such as CT scans and X-rays into 3D computer models. Such computer models allow for the use of Finite Element analysis,  and for us to create more detailed models of bony and soft tissue mechanics in activities of daily life and after injury and surgery. These models are then adapted for designing shoulder implants, planning shoulder surgeries, and clinical decision-making. Hence the Mimics Innovation Suite is a fundamental analysis tool that we use.

Students and Post docs had the chance to join the first of a series of training sessions with  PhD students Mr Maxence Lavaill, Mr Xiaolong fan, Mr Arun Jolly, Miss Natali Uribe – M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering, Dr Dermot O’Rourke, Mr Marco Branni, and Dr Edmund Pickering in attendance.

As described by one of our clinical partners, Adj. Prof. Ashish Gupta of his work at his start-up company Akunah, “we work with data analytics and use computer modeling for planning primaries and complex revision arthroplasty. The Materialise Mimics Innovation Suite forms the backbone of QUASR, but we also use the technology in computer modeling solutions we provide our clients and customers globally. I believe that the software is quite powerful and enables us to bring substantial benefits to research and at the point of care.”

As we work ni partnership with Adj. Prof Gupta to create more accurate 3D computer models for pre-operative patient care and to test different bone and soft-tissue qualities and model kinematic data, the software will remain a central research tool for the duration of the centre.

The training was a great success with students from the centre incorporating the technology into their projects and how the technology is now supporting the  roll-out of Virtual Reality technology in operating theatres.

The team looks forward to participating in future trainings on the software and learning more advanced features. We’d like to thank Ms Monica Russell, Ms Sasha S. & Ms   Susan Ong for the organisation of this training.