Rice Professor Wins National Award for Bioengineering

Contact: Philip Montgomery
Phone: (713) 831-4792

Rice Professor Wins National Award for Bioengineering

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.

"Individual cells do not perform organ functions," Mikos said."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."

In the past, Mikos has successfully grown liver cells in a
polymer scaffold in rats, a feat that has attracted national
attention. More recently, his research has focused on bone
regeneration.

In 1993, Mikos received an Orthopedic Research and Educational
Foundation award to pursue bone regeneration research in conjunction
with Michael Yaszemski, an orthopedic surgeon at Lackland Air Force
Base in San Antonio.

Mikos also received a 1993 National Science Foundation grant to
purchase equipment to study the degradation of the polymers used to
build bone scaffolding.

Rice University is an independent, coeducational, nonsectarian
private university dedicated to undergraduate teaching and graduate
studies, research and professional training in selected disciplines.
It has an undergraduate student population of 2,572, a graduate and
professional student population of 1,375 and a full-time faculty of
448.

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