Associate Professor Jungwoo Lee of the UMass Amherst Chemical Engineering (ChE) Department and four research colleagues have received a U.S. patent for their invention called “Demineralized Bone Paper” (DBP), which they fabricate from ultra-thin slices of demineralized compact bone. The pioneering invention entails three-dimensional, bone-tissue grafts produced from stacked DBP, methods for treating patients using those tissue grafts, and assay systems based on culturing bone-promoting cells on DBP.
The backstory of the trailblazing invention is that demineralized bone matrix has been utilized successfully for clinical-bone-tissue regeneration and in vitro bone-tissue engineering while also stimulating the formation of bone. But, according to Lee and his team, “The potential of the demineralized bone matrix for in vitro bone-tissue modeling has not been fully exploited.”