Dr. Farshid Guilak

Amber Collins

Shannon O’Connor

Durham, N.C– Division of Orthopaedic Research receives 3 new NIH grants!    The Research Division is excited to announce several new NIH grants and fellowships that were award this month.  Dr. Guilak received a research grant in collaboration with Dr. Charles Gersbach, entitled, “Scaffold-Mediated Gene Delivery for Engineering of Osteochondral Tissues”.  This makes Dr. Guilak one of very few people in the country who is Principal Investigator of 6 NIH grants, along with two other federal grants and numerous foundation grants.   This project is one of the first approaches of combining gene therapy and tissue engineering to regenerate cartilage and bone for joint repair.

Dr. Amber Collins, a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Lou DeFrate, received a prestigious NIH F32 Fellowship Award entitled, “Biomechanical Markers of Knee Osteoarthritis and In Vivo Cartilage Loading”.   Amber’s project will examine the effects of obesity on cartilage strain as well as other MR imaging signals in cartilage.  Shannon O’Connor, a MD/PhD student working with Dr. Farsh Guilak, received a highly competitive NIH F31 Fellowship entitled, “Functional Tissue Engineering of Cartilage Using Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells”.   Shannon, who is the Graduate Young Trustee on Duke’s board, will focus on developing new methods to direct the differentiation of pluripotent stem cells into chondrocytes and osteoblasts.