Repairing repair

A Stanford team has figured out one reason diabetics have impaired bone healing, and devised a method of boosting skeletal stem cell expansion to correct the complication. The January study in Science Translational Medicine builds on the team’s 2015 discovery of skeletal stem cells in mice that respond to bone fractures by dividing to promote repair.

Based on the earlier findings, team leader Michael Longaker told BioCentury he wondered whether skeletal stem cell expansion might be deficient in diabetes patients, who are more prone to fractures and to slower and less complete healing of fractures than non-diabetics. “We said, ‘Let’s look at diabetes and its fracture repair through that lens of skeletal stem cells.’” Longaker is a vice chair of surgery at Stanford University and co-director of the university’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology & Regenerative Medicine...