Hartford Business Journal

HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | APRIL 17, 2023 45 UConn's Dr. Cato Laurencin is a pioneer in the field of regenerative medicine and the Albert and Wilda Van Dusen Distinguished Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery. PETE MORENUS/UCONN 'Moon Shot' UConn's Laurencin forms new startup amid quest to help humans regrow limbs By Harriet Jones Hartford Business Journal Contributor I n 2019, the Veterans Administra- tion cared for more than 95,000 service members who had lost limbs. Over the prior decade, the VA says it saw a 34% increase in the number of veterans with amputations who received care. Those stark statistics have meant there's been a huge investment in recent years into fields including prosthetics, as ever more complex medical devices try to return as much function as possible to these wounded warriors. But at UConn, another entirely different approach to this problem has been gathering pace over the last eight years. The startling question it's trying to answer: What if amputees could regrow their own new limbs? "Obviously this is a great big moon shot, maybe even a Mars shot, but we're excited about the progress that we've made," said Dr. Cato Laurencin. "Also, we're excited about the types of technologies that we're developing along the way." Laurencin, the Van Dusen Distin- guished Endowed Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at UConn, is no stranger to moonshot endeavors, and his track record speaks for itself. He began in the late 1980s contrib- uting to the research that made it possible to grow bone outside of the human body. He went on to found the field of regenerative engineering, and pioneered a way to help the body regrow the vulnerable ACL knee ligament. This year he opened UConn's new Cato T. Laurencin Institute for Regenerative Engineering, a multi- disciplinary effort aimed at devel- oping new approaches in medicine, science, engineering and technology to support his latest moonshot effort. Launched in 2015, that project is dubbed the Hartford Engineering A Limb (HEAL) project, and it set the ambitious goal of being able to regrow a limb by 2030. Laurencin received the $5 million National Insti- tutes of Health's Director's Pioneer Award for the work, and has since also been funded by the Department of Defense. A little over halfway through his timeline, he is still targeting the same end date, although at the moment the complete process remains elusive. But on the journey there he and his team — he estimates across disciplines some 50 scientists are involved in one way or another — have explored numerous areas of developmental biology to expand the toolbox for regenerative engi- neering, as well as numerous ways to get the resulting technologies to the marketplace. For instance, the project has fostered systems for the creation of bone, ligament, tendon, nerves, blood vessels and cartilage. "We've been able to really hone in and create all the different muscu- loskeletal tissues of the upper and lower extremity," said Laurencin. The team has studied salaman- ders that are able to regenerate limbs throughout their lives. That work yielded knowledge of a new type of cell that is key to the regenerative process. "We call these GRID cells, because we think that they're part of the network of cells that help limbs regen- erate," said Laurencin. GRID stands for Groups that are Regenerative, Interspersed and Dendritic, and he hypothesizes that understanding the function of GRID cells will lead to the ability to induce regeneration in humans by engi- neering a positional information grid to control the response of cells. The team has also been able to generate synthetic artificial stem cells, or what they call SASC cells, a technology on which they have a patent pending. These cells are able to induce regeneration in joints. "If we take an animal and induce arthritis, with heavy joint destruction, if we place our SASC cells in that joint, it regenerates the joint," said Laurencin. "So, we have a pathway now for joint regeneration. And now we're scaling that up. We've done DR. CATO LAURENCIN University Professor and Van Dusen Distinguished Endowed Professor UConn Education: Princeton University, chemical engineering; M.D., Harvard Medical School; Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, biochemical engineering/biotechnology Age: 64

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