Scientists Can Now Turn Stem Cells Into Bone Using Nothing More Than Sound

Stem cells can be used to repair parts of the human body that have been damaged by injury.

Stem cells need to be manipulated on demand, and a new study shows that using sound waves to turn stem cells into bone cells can be done in as little as five days.

The researchers hope that this technique could be used to regrowth bone that has been lost to cancer or other types of disease.

The setup has a chip on the left and stem cells on the right, with green representing sound waves. Ambattu et al., Small, 2022.

Amy Gelmi is a Vice-Chancellor's Research Fellow at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia.

It is very easy to apply to the stem cells and this method doesn't require any special drugs.

The approach builds on years of work into modifying materials with sound waves above 10 MHz, which are much higher frequencies than researchers have previously used in these kinds of experiments. The stem cells were put in the culture plate with the help of a microchip.

Other experimental processes in this field have had some success, but they are difficult to set up, expensive to manage, and difficult to scale up. Stem cells from a patient's bone marrow is a painful procedure.

The new approach is an improvement over the old one. The researchers have shown that it works with a variety of stem cells, including fat-derived stem cells.

The stem cells turn into bone cells. RMIT is a word.

The sound waves can be used to apply the right amount of pressure to the stem cells.

Our device is cheap and simple to use, so could easily be upscaled for treating large numbers of cells simultaneously, vital for effective tissue engineering.

That is the next stage in the process. Scientists are going to have to make sure that this approach works outside of a small lab test. There is scope for the technology to be smaller.

Stem cells can be turned into different types of cells to fight a variety of health issues. As our understanding of the biological building blocks increases, we can better understand how our bodies work.

There are multiple ways of using this process as a treatment if it can be upscaled. It is hoped that bioreactors can be developed to process stem cells in this way.

Gelmi says that the new approach has strong potential to be used for treating the stem cells before we either coat them onto an implant or inject them directly into the body for tissue engineering.

The research has been published.