University of Leeds
The University of Leeds was established in 1874. It is a public research university in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. It has 33,300 students and is the 5th largest in the UK. The Leeds School of Medicine is one of the largest medical schools in Europe, with over 300 medical students being trained in each of the clinical years and over 1,000 teaching, research, technical and administrative staff. The medical school has centres of excellence split down into Leeds Institute of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine (LICAMM), Leeds Institute of Health Sciences (LIHS), Leeds Institute of Medical Education (LIME), Leeds Institute of Medical Research at St James (LIMR), Leeds Institute of Clinical Trials Research (LICTR) and The Leeds Institute of Rheumatic Molecular Medicine (LIRMM).
Role within SBR
UNIVLEEDS will be involved in the design and structural composition of the SBR device. Moreover, the team will perform biocompatibility testing of base electrospun/bioprinted PLLA biomaterial with human bone marrow (BM)- and periosteum (P)-derived multipotential stromal cells (MSCs), as well as sheep BM-MSCs. They will be studying the direct and indirect biocompatibility as well as MSC proliferation, alignment, and migration activity on the biomaterials. The UNIVLEEDS team will be involved in measuring the baseline osteogenic and angiogenic support activity of the base and genetically-modified biomaterial. They will be responsible for the biocompatibility testing of liposome-loaded (LL) biomaterial as well as the MSC functional assessment of differentiation and angiogenic support on functionalised biomaterials.