Under a $1.91 million grant from the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) and National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), the University of Massachusetts Amherst will be able to explore the human internal clock responsible for regulating sleep cycles. Many other biological functions will be probed as a tool for optimizing tissue regeneration as well.
NIH Grant for Circadian Rhythm Study
Cathal Kearney, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, and his group at the interdisciplinary Institute for Applied Life Sciences will use animal models in their five-year NIH grant studies, according to News Medical. They will disrupt some of the animals' circadian rhythms to see how they respond to tissue regeneration.
NIH Grant
He said that it should be concluded that circadian rhythms are important for tissue engineering. They are very optimistic that this will be the case based on their preliminary data and available evidence.
The next step will be to create targeted circadian rhythm restoration tools for tissue engineering and drug delivery. Thus, studies evaluating the significance of timed drug delivery will be made possible.
Almost every medical issue we face, according to him, has a circadian rhythm component. Given its significance to the body, it is a huge gap that needs to be filled that it is not taken into account in tissue engineering studies.
Circadian Rhythm in Tissue Engineering
The body's internal 24-hour clock, known as circadian rhythms, controls many vital biological processes like blood pressure and body temperature, in addition to the sleep-wake cycle.
Our cells each contain an intrinsic biochemical clock that regulates the expression of genes and proteins over a roughly 24-hour cycle.
Previous studies found that many of the rhythmically expressed proteins in fibroblasts controlled the polymerization of actin, a structural protein crucial for migration. This information helped researchers better understand how this circadian rhythm affects cell function.
Fibroblasts moved more quickly to a wound that was received during the active phase of the circadian cycle than to a wound that was received during the dormant phase in experiments with cell cultures, tissue samples, and mice.
Currently, individual cells in tissue engineering cultures each have a circadian rhythm. But without careful handling and signaling, they will quickly lose sync with one another. This stops the body's natural rhythmic processes in their tracks.
According to a study published in Science Translational Medicine, patients who experience irregular rhythms—often brought on by environmental stressors like shift work and illnesses like diabetes or obesity—also tend to have poor tissue repair. Additionally, they discovered that disruption of circadian rhythm has a significant impact on healing: skin wounds sustained at night heal 60% more slowly than those sustained during the day.
Relationship Between Circadian Rhythm and Therapeutic Drug
More research is required on the crucial connection between circadian rhythm and therapeutic drug delivery. This can be accomplished by ensuring that lab-created tissues used to screen potential drug candidates have a circadian rhythm.
The pharmaceutical companies that use a system devoid of a circadian rhythm to move and stop moving drugs through their pipeline.
Disregarding that connection could result in promising drugs under development being deemed ineffective when they might work well if given at a precise time of day.
