CORDIS

Blood and bone are closely intertwined. Their intrinsic regenerative capacities are disturbed in many hematological and musculoskeletal diseases. Re-establishing the regenerative potential is the key to cure these diseases by regenerative medicine. Multipotent stem cells of both tissues – hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) for blood and mesenchymal stem/stromal (MSCs) for bone – are the basis for their regenerative capacity. While it is well established that HSCs are influenced by the bone marrow in their natural environment including MSCs and their progeny, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the reciprocal relationship. The hypothesis of the project bloodANDbone is that only when taking both tissues and their mutual crosstalk into account, we will be able to understand how the regenerative potential of blood and bone is impaired in disease and how it can be re-established with novel treatment strategies. For this purpose we need to understand the early events of disease onset and progression. Due to the limitations of such studies in human beings and animals, we are developing human in vitro models of healthy bone marrow, which can be induced to develop hematological and musculoskeletal diseases with high incidence, namely leukemia, multiple myeloma and bone metastasis. Previously we developed a simplified bone marrow analog that bases on macroporous, cell-laden biomaterials with tunable physical, biochemical and biological properties. This versatility enables us to create biomimetic human in vitro models of the human bone marrow in health and disease, which are ground-breaking in their applicability to investigate how the regenerative balance of bone marrow is maintained in health and disturbed in the different kinds of diseases – a prerequisite to develop novel regenerative treatments – as well as their scalability and thus suitability as in vitro test systems for screening of novel drugs or treatments.

In the first 9 months of the project, all team members were hired and started their work within the different work packages. In October 2018, the team changed from the old host institution (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, KIT) to a new host institution (Leibniz University Hannover, LUH), where the PI took up a position as full professor.
All team members gained quickly the knowledge necessary to work on the project and started successfully into the laboratory work. First results were obtained and the team is on a good way to achieve the milestones planned for the second reporting period.
A first publication appeared with substantial contribution of the team of the bloodANDbone project (Raic, A., Naolou, T., Mohra, A., Chatterjee, C., & Lee-Thedieck, C. (2019). 3D models of the bone marrow in health and disease: Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. MRS Communications, 9(1), 37-52. doi:10.1557/mrc.2018.203).

The goal of the project bloodANDbone is to find new ways to help patients suffering from haematological or musculoskeletal diseases by understanding the mutual relationship between the blood- and the bone-forming system during regeneration.