Welcome to the Tissue Engineering Laboratories

 

On behalf of all of our team, I would like to welcome you to the Tissue Engineering Laboratories of the Veterans Administration Boston Healthcare System, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School. Our team includes scientists, engineers, and clinicians from VA medical centers, Harvard, MIT, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston University and other institutions. The Laboratories are located at the Boston Campus of the VA Boston Healthcare System.

The efforts of the Laboratories are directed toward tissue engineering and regenerative medicine solutions to the medical problems that cause pain and disability to those who have suffered injuries in military service or in civilian life and who have lost tissue and organ function as a result of disease or aging processes. The problems on which we are working involve loss of the following tissues:

• Articular Cartilage and Intervertebral Disc
• Bone, Tendon, and Ligament
• Spinal Cord and Peripheral Nerve
• Brain and Retina
• Heart and Lung

Our goal is to improve rehabilitation through the use of implants which induce and facilitate biological processes which can result in regeneration of the lost tissues and organs. Many of our approaches employ absorbable collagen devices to be implanted alone or to incorporate cells or genes prior to implantation. The Laboratories, which are funded principally by the Department of Veterans Affairs, also receive grant support from other federal agencies including the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health, and from industry.

We invite you to visit our Website, to meet the people behind the labcoats, and learn more about our research and the courses that we teach at MIT and Harvard Medical School. If you are a patient, please read more about our technology/discovery on the page that is dedicated to you. Finally to contact us or visit us, please visit our contact page.