{"id":5003,"date":"2019-05-17T12:58:48","date_gmt":"2019-05-17T16:58:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qa.vet.purdue.edu\/news\/?p=5003"},"modified":"2019-05-17T12:58:48","modified_gmt":"2019-05-17T16:58:48","slug":"bms-faculty-led-research-addresses-challenges-involved-in-treating-rotator-cuff-tears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/bms-faculty-led-research-addresses-challenges-involved-in-treating-rotator-cuff-tears.php","title":{"rendered":"BMS Faculty-led Research Addresses Challenges Involved in Treating Rotator Cuff Tears"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Dr.
Dr. Dianne Little<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Dianne Little, an assistant professor in Purdue Veterinary Medicine\u2019s Department of Basic Medical Sciences, knows first-hand about rotator cuff tears. A few years ago, when she was leading a horse around the corner of a barn, she was suddenly met by a piece of construction equipment with a tarp flapping heavily in the wind. The horse spooked, rearing up on its hind legs, and tried to head for the hills. Dr. Little held tight, refusing to lose control of the horse, but she left the barn that day with a partially dislocated shoulder and a torn rotator cuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rotator cuff tears can happen in a split second, like Dr. Little\u2019s\ndid, or they can be caused by prolonged stress and degeneration over years or\neven decades, finally reaching a point of no return. It\u2019s estimated that up to two\nmillion people in the United States visit their doctors because of a torn\nrotator cuff each year, with athletes and older active adults especially\nvulnerable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Little, has been studying rotator cuff tears and how to\nrepair them for several years.  \u201cRotator\ncuff tears are a really debilitating injury because you can no longer do simple\nthings like brush your hair or put your seat belt on,\u201d she said. \u201cOnce it gets\nto that point, many tears need to be repaired surgically. But the problem is,\nthere\u2019s no way to do it that has guaranteed results. Depending on the patient\npopulation and on the size of the tear, up to 90 percent of tears repaired surgically\nfail, so there\u2019s a big push to try and find better solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Current methods to repair rotator cuff tears involve\nstitching the torn tendon back to the bone, using a biomaterial made from human\nor animal tissue or doing a transfer using tendon from nearby to replace\nrotator cuff function. In some cases, a joint replacement may be necessary. But\ndue to the high physical demands on rotator cuffs and the complex anatomy of\ntendon, re-tears after surgery are common.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Little wants to engineer tendon that would match the\npatient\u2019s own rotator cuff. If surgeons were able to use tendon that matched\nthat of the healthy tendon to repair it, they might be able to stimulate early\nregeneration, rather than scarring and fibrosis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there\u2019s one big hurdle in the way of tendon engineering:\nresearchers don\u2019t fully understand what tendon is.  \u201cWe know what tendon looks like and how it\nbehaves, but we don\u2019t really know what it is. There\u2019s no marker that tells you,\n\u2018This is tendon.\u2019 There are certain markers for bone and cartilage, so when you\nsee them, you know that\u2019s what you\u2019re looking at. But that\u2019s not true for\ntendon because we don\u2019t know enough about what tendon is,\u201d Dr. Little said. \u201cIf\nyou\u2019re trying to grow new tendon, you need to know what it is before you know\nwhether or not you\u2019ve recreated it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health\ncould help her toward a breakthrough in the field. For the next five years, Dr.\nLittle will be trying to figure out what the rotator cuff tendon looks like at\nevery level \u2013 from the proteins, fats and metabolites, to the genetic code that\nmakes tissue turn into tendon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For her study, she\u2019ll use human tissue and stem cells from\nfat that aren\u2019t suitable for transplantation to create new tendon. Then she\u2019ll sequence\nall these levels and genetic factors of the engineered tendon and naturally\noccurring tendon to see how those profiles change. \u201cWe\u2019ll be able to see if the\nnew tendon ends up being the same as the existing tendon or if it\u2019s different,\nand if so, how we could push it to become better tendon,\u201d Dr. Little said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This research aligns with Purdue’s Giant Leaps celebration, acknowledging the University\u2019s global advancements made in health and longevity as part of Purdue\u2019s 150th anniversary. This is one of the four themes of the yearlong celebration\u2019s Ideas Festival, designed to showcase Purdue as an intellectual center solving real-world issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The project is supported by an award from the National\nInstitute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases. Dr. Little will\ncollaborate with an interdisciplinary team, including a departmental colleague,\nDr. Marxa Figueiredo, associate professor of basic medical sciences; Dr. Sarah\nCalve, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Purdue; Dr. Uma Aryal\nand Dr. Jyothi Thimmapurum, researchers in Purdue\u2019s Bindley Bioscience Center;\nand Dr. Grant Garrigues, of Midwest Orthopedics at Rush. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Dianne Little, an assistant professor in Purdue Veterinary Medicine\u2019s Department of Basic Medical Sciences, has been researching rotator cuff tears and how to repair them for several years. A $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health could help her toward a breakthrough in the field. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":5005,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,39,29,11],"tags":[75,539,8,26,602,56,538,1155,1154],"class_list":["post-5003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faculty-staff","category-musculoskeletal-and-orthopedics","category-our-people","category-research","tag-bms","tag-dianne-little","tag-faculty","tag-featured-story","tag-giant-leaps","tag-homepage","tag-marxa-figueiredo","tag-nih","tag-rotator-cuff-research"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5003"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5008,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5003\/revisions\/5008"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vet.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}