Uppsala researcher awarded VINNOVA grant
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VINNOVA has decided to award one of five VINNMER Marie Curie Incoming Grants to Gemma Mestres at the Department of Engineering Sciences and her research project on calcium phosphate cements.
The project is titled “Tailoring inflammatory response by using topographically different calcium phosphate cements” and is a collaboration between Uppsala University and the Technical University of Catalonia in Spain, with the aim to investigate if and how the topography of calcium phosphate cements, materials used for bone regeneration, can be tailored to “steer” the inflammatory response.
To add yet another level of control, immunosuppressive drugs will be incorporated into the cements. The inflammation process associated to implants is a crucial reaction for the subsequent tissue repair, thus the intensity of this initial reaction determines the healing rate around the implant. Tailoring the immune response by varying the topography of the calcium phosphate cements and modulating a drug release could thus dramatically increase the success rate of today’s implants.