Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Cleft palate is a congenital defect which develops due to a combination of genetics and environmental factors and occurs in 1.7 per 1000 live born infants worldwide. Infants with cleft palates have an opening in the roof of the upper jaws where the two sides of the hard palate did not fuse together during the infant development. The cleft affects speech, hearing and physical appearance leading to poor long-term health and psychology outcomes of these patients. Children with cleft defects need multidisciplinary health care from birth till adulthood. Treatment of cleft defects typically requires grafting the defect using bone obtained from the same patient to close the cleft defect. But, bone grafting is not always successful. Also for the child, bone grafting needs prolonged healing time together with associated risk of infection and significant pain at both cleft palate site and donor site. Therefore, there is a call for alternative treatments to decrease the severity of the side effects associated with donor site injury and limited supply of donor bone. To overcome current grafting limitations my research focuses on developing tissue engineering approach to provide more effective and minimally invasive treatment options for cleft patients. Naturally occurring proteins that can promote bone growth (bone morphogenetic proteins) will be delivered to bone marrow cells, which are well known for its high regenerative potential. After optimizing the conditions for bone regeneration in cell culture, the bone morphogenetic proteins and cells will be delivered using innovative materials and tested in selected animal model, with cleft palate defect, to insure its biological efficacy and safety. This study will develop an effective bioactive graft and will establish a foundation for tissue engineering solution for cleft palates that have minimal side effects and therefore increasing the quality of life for cleft palate patients.