4/10/2023 Bethan Owen
Professor Griebel recently published a paper on how tissue heals from laser ablation damage, which serves as a stand-in for how those tissues might heal from a more common burn. This paper, titled “Fibroblast clearance of damaged tissue following laser ablation in engineered microtissues,” was published through APL Bioengineering.
Written by Bethan Owen
Anyone who has been through the usual small accidents like falling off a bike or burning their hand on the stove has experienced first-hand that different injuries—like cuts, scrapes, and burns—heal in different ways and at different rates. What the average person probably doesn’t know is what is going on in the skin itself as these different injuries heal. Fortunately, Professor Megan Griebel can give us a glimpse inside.
Griebel recently published a paper on how tissue heals from laser ablation damage, which serves as a stand-in for how those tissues might heal from a more common burn. This paper, titled “Fibroblast clearance of damaged tissue following laser ablation in engineered microtissues,” was published through APL Bioengineering and was based on work Griebel conducted at her PhD institution, Boston University, under her thesis advisors, Prof. Jeroen Eyckmans and Prof. Christopher Chen.
In Prof. Eyckmans’ lab, Griebel and her peers traditionally created injuries with a tiny micro-dissection knife. The premise of her paper was to introduce a different type of injury for study, which she did through laser ablation.
Griebel et. al. saw that the laser damage created more peripheral damage than the knife, similar to how a burn does more damage to surrounding tissues than a cut would. But this wasn’t the only thing she discovered during the course of the project.
“We were able to see fibroblasts clear the damaged tissue,” Griebel said, “which is really interesting, because we generally think of immune cells as carrying out that process. In our experiments we didn't have any immune cells, and we saw that the fibroblasts were able to navigate this damaged tissue in order to repair the wound. We investigated further and saw that they're actually taking up the damaged collagen.”
One of the reasons that Griebel and her team were able to make this discovery is because they were working on artificial tissues designed to imitate the mechanical properties and the extracellular matrix (ECM) structure that cells would see within the human body. This led to a better understanding of how the ECM was affected by injury, rather than just the cells themselves.
“Historically, cell work has been done on plastic. And plastic is very, very different than the body,” said Griebel. “I'm hoping that through this work more attention will be given to the matrix during wound healing, because it's really important. The matrix in any tissue holds biochemical cues and mechanical properties that influence cell behavior. I'm hoping that more attention will be given to that piece of the puzzle in the future.”
Griebel’s work has the potential for other lasting impacts, too. The premise of Griebel’s doctoral project at Boston University was getting the laser ablation system set up and ensuring that it worked properly. Now that the laser ablation method is available at Boston University, there’s potential for all kinds of further studies that would be otherwise inaccessible.
“I'm excited to see what comes down the pipeline from some of the students that I helped mentor that have joined the lab,” Griebel said. “It'll be fun to see their stories come out in a couple years’ time.”