Rice bioengineer wins award at regenerative medicine conference

Rice bioengineering graduate student James Kretlow won an award for outstanding presentation by a graduate student, postdoctoral or clinical fellow at the first Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM) Annual Meeting held January 14-16 in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Kretlow, a fourth year graduate student in the joint Baylor College of Medicine-Rice University Medical Scientist Training Program, won the award, which includes a cash prize, for his presentation titled “Porous Poly(methyl methacrylate) Implants for Osseous Space Maintenance Following Craniofacial Injury.” The award-wining presentation describes advances made towards developing biomaterials that can temporarily replace large, traumatically injured or surgically resected bone defects, allowing surrounding tissues to heal before repairing the bone with a graft or regenerated tissue.

The work is a joint effort between researchers at Rice, led by Antonios G. Mikos, the Louis Calder Professor of Bioengineering and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and collaborators at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, led by Mark Wong, chairman of the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery.

Mikos and Wong serve as program leaders for bone and craniofacial regeneration teams within AFIRM, an $85 million grant awarded in 2008 from the Department of Defense that unites researchers from over 30 institutions and corporations to rapidly bring regenerative medicine products and tissue engineering strategies into clinical use for the treatment of military personnel injured during combat.

Authors of the study, along with Kretlow, Mikos, and Wong, include Meng Shi, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Bioengineering, F. Kurtis Kasper, a faculty fellow in the Department of Bioengineering, and Simon Young, an Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery resident at UT-Houston and Ph.D. graduate of the Department of Bioengineering.