About Us

Our Vision

Tissue engineering (TE) aims to repair or regenerate injured tissue and organs.

At the same time, TE can provide solutions to the classic problems with lack of donors, graft rejections, and the body’s inflammatory responses to bone grafting, even when the bone tissue is taken from the patient hirself (autologous).

In the last several decades, a tremendous development in life sciences, engineering and information technology has taken place. Combined, this makes biomedicine a uniquely promising research discipline.

Recent advances in stem cells, molecular biology, bioengineering and biomaterials, have led to the emergence of the field of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine (TE/RM). This field is one of the most rapidly developing fields in biomedicine. UiB is committed to developing TE/RM on campus, and has supported it with:

  • Establishing a consortium of scientists and clinicians in skeletal regenerative medicine and stem cell research
  • Setting up an effective and multi-disciplinary research infrastructure, and laboratories
  • Establishing strong links and interactions between researchers and clinicians from different faculties and departments, as well as Haukeland University Hospital

The disease burden of bone defect on the quality of life is well recognized.

TE approaches for bone disease are available and have indeed come a long way over the last decades. However, more clinically relevant bone/cartilage tissue substitutes are needed.

In TE, there are two main strategies that researchers have adopted:

(1) cell-based, where cells are been manipulated to create their own environment before transplanted to the host, and

(2) scaffold-based, where a 3D biomaterial is created to mimic in vivo structures. The bone structures and the to-date inadequate therapies make this a very attractive topic for TE. The challenge here is to be able to get the scientists, engineers, and clinicians to work together to tackle today’s challenges and give our patients the best possible treatment.

Our Goals