Lisa M Larkin

I am a Professor of Molecular & Integrative Physiology at the University of Michigan and also hold a joint appointment in the Biomedical Engineering Department at the University of Michigan. I am Director of the Skeletal Tissue Engineering Laboratory and have over 30 years of expertise on musculoskeletal physiology and more than 23 years’ experience specifically with ligament, tendon, muscle and bone tissue engineering. My laboratory has pioneered methods to co-culture scaffold-free tissue constructs to engineer functional tissues and their interfaces. In particular, we developed a scaffold-less method to engineer three-dimensional (3D) muscle, nerve conduit, tendon, bone and ligament constructs from primary, bone marrow stromal cells (BMSCs) and adipose stem cells (ASCs). I hold 7 patents for this work, and I have co-authored 41 peer-reviewed journal papers specifically on tissue engineering, another 33 on the physiology of muscle, 4 reviews and 2 book chapters on muscle tissue engineering. I am a member of the American Physiological Society, the Society for Neuroscience, the Tissue Engineering Society International, the Biomedical Engineering Society, the Orthopaedic Research Society, and the American Society for Peripheral Nerve.

The research aims of my laboratory are to fabricate 3D musculoskeletal tissues for use in basic biomedical research as well as for implantation in vivo to expose them to the actual mechanical and biochemical environments of a hindlimb. Following implantation, we rigorously evaluate alterations in the structural, functional and histological characteristics of the tissues in response to strain-shielded and unshielded mechanical environments, to optimize the use of the engineered tissues for tissue repair and replacement. Recent data has shown efficacy of the tissue-engineered skeletal muscle grafts in a large animal, the sheep hindlimb volumetric muscle loss (VML) model. This technology shows great potential to return the function of musculoskeletal tissues damaged due to trauma or disease.