CATHRYN SUNDBACK, Sc.D. is the Director of the Laboratory for Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Director of the Biomaterials Core within the Center for Regenerative Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Dr. Sundback’s research focuses on the application of biomaterials for tissue engineering of facial and limb tissues, particularly peripheral nerve, skeletal muscle, and bone. She has developed neural guidance conduits to repair peripheral nerve injuries with improved return of function, resulting in numerous publications and pending patents. She is currently developing clinically translatable models to engineer functional skeletal muscle tissue and vascularized bone.

At the Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Sundback directs the Laboratory for Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication and is the principal investigator on numerous federal and commercial grants in the area of peripheral nerve regeneration, engineering of skeletal muscle and bone, and the development of biodegradable elastomeric biomaterials for clinical applications.

The Tissue Engineering & Organ Fabrication Laboratory at Harvard Medical School works closely with engineers and scientists from MIT and the Draper Laboratories.

Collaborating with Professor Robert Langer from MIT, we began building living tissues using living cells on specially designed degradable plastics. This invention is now patented and being tested worldwide.

Our work is also a part of the Center for Innovations in Minimally Invasive Therapies as well as the Department of Surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Tissue Engineering is a new field in science, medicine and engineering in which living replacements for organs and tissues of the body are designed and built. Almost every tissue and organ of the body has been studied and many are now available for human use or in the final phases of FDA approved trials. Our laboratory at Harvard has been designing and building organs and tissues for almost 15 years. We have worked closely with scientists and engineers at MIT and have studied 27 tissues of the body.

The Tissue Engineering & Organ Fabrication Lab uses cells combined with special plastics, which act as the scaffolding upon which the living tissue is built. Several clinical trials are now underway.
http://www.massgeneral.org/research/researchlab.aspx?id=1055