PhD position in materials science and tissue engineering

PhD Position open in the field of 3D printing, materials science, tissue engineering and cell culture models at the TU Wien (Vienna, Austria) within the research group “3D Printing and Biofabrication”. The candidate will work on stem cell scaffolded spheroids for disc repair. 

It is a 4-years fully funded position.

PhD Position open in the field of 3D printing, materials science, tissue engineering and cell culture models at the TU Wien (Vienna, Austria)

within the research group “3D Printing and Biofabrication”. The candidate will work on stem cell scaffolded spheroids for disc repair.

Numerous attempts for alleviating low back pain (LBP) have been presented by either injecting single cell suspensions (cell-based therapy) or delivering biomaterial matrices (scaffold-based therapy). Still, LBP remains a redundant healthcare burden for our society, and searching for new

and more ambitious therapeutic modalities to stimulate intervertebral disc (IVD) repair is of high relevance.

The project: Regenerating IVD tissues through the Third TERM approach We have recently shown that a new strategy, called the “third tissue engineering” can bring unprecedented opportunity in the field of tissue repair[1,2]. This originalstrategy consistsin creating injectable tissue units containing stem cell spheroids encaged within micro-size scaffolds. The fabrication of multiple of those microscaffolds with high porosity and thin struts is permitted thanks to the high-resolution capability of multiphoton lithography (MPL) 3D printing that we have developed in our

group.

Our goal and what we offer

We envision to attack the problem of poor IVD regeneration potential of the existing therapies, through an unprecedented approach requiring

multidisciplinary expertise, with partners in Austria (TU Wien) and Switzerland (AO, Davos). 266 million francs for cutting-edge research

projects (snf.ch)

We offer a 4 years PhD position, which aims are (1) to design and to 3D print using 2-PP microscaffolds and to functionalize them, (2) to assess in vitro the differentiation potential of stem cells into suitable tissue, and (3) to study the injectability and the self-assembly of those building

blocks into IVD-like tissue

More info are available here:

https://www.tuwien.at/index.php?eID=dumpFile&t=f&f=145989&token=47c867fa06925be764aad8facff5c4ffa0190dea