1994- Tony Mikos, the T.N. Law Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, has been named the recipient of the Whitaker Young Investigator Award for his research on tissue engineering. The Biomedical Engineering Society presents the Whitaker Young Investigator Award each year to a single scientist to stimulate research careers in biomedical engineering. Mikos will receive the Young Investigator Award at the society's annual fall meeting in Tempe, Ariz., in October. The Biomedical Engineering Society gave Mikos the award in part because of his past research and in part for a paper, which demonstrated the feasibility of creating scaffolds or templates upon which to regenerate metabolic organs and tissues.
Scaffolds provide supporting structures and guides for organ regeneration.
For instance, a scaffold for a bone would help the bone cells grow in the proper manner. Scaffolds are usually composed of biodegradable polymers similar to the common internal surgical stitches that dissolve in the body. In order for cells, such as liver cells or cartilage cells or bone cells, to act like the native organ, they need to interact with each other. This is what we're trying to do with synthetic materials. We're trying to mimic the natural environment or the extracellular matrix by providing a scaffold for the cells to attach, grow and form new tissue.