About Us

Every year, millions of surgical operations are performed in which tissue/organ substitutes are required to repair or replace damaged organs/tissues. Tissue engineering is an emerging field with the aim of producing artificial tissue/organ substitutes (or scaffolds) that can grow with patients, thereby providing a permanent solution  to damaged tissues/organs (the figure in the right). One examples is the regeneration of injured peripheral nerves by means of a scaffold, as shown in the following figure.

Aimed at producing tissue/organ scaffolds for various tissue engineering applications, the Tissue Engineering Research Group (TERG) was founded in 2007 by Dr. Daniel X. B. Chen, with the collaboration of faculty members and reserachers from College of Engineering, College of Medinice and Canadian Light Source.

Supported by the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation (SHRF), TERG members worked collaboratively on the development of tissue scaffolds and their applications to the repair of peripheral nervous system (PNS) injury and the repair of damaged/diseased cartilage of articular joints in the treatment of osteoarthritis as well as the development of synchrotron biomedical imaging technologies to characterize scaffolds and tissue samples since. The research collaborations within the TERG had proven to be a remarkable success; which resulted in the continuous award of an SHRF Health Research Group – Phase III Grant in 2013. This allowed us to continue research to foster our current research and expand into two new areas: (1) stroke and biodegradable stent treatment and (2) scaffold-guided cell culture processes in perfusion bioreactors.

The Bio-Fabrication Laboratory is the place where innovative studies have been performing. Although various fabrication techniques are employed in this Lab, the dispensing-based fabrication is currently the key one amongst all.