Welcome to Dr. Yunzhi Peter Yang’s Group at Stanford University.

Globally, musculoskeletal diseases and trauma have an estimated cost of US$950 billion annually, placing a significant economic burden on national healthcare systems. Musculoskeletal ailments severely impact mobility, dramatically reducing the quality of life for patients, especially the elderly. Regenerative medicine and tissue engineering hold great promise to improve the treatment of these diseases and trauma as well as to restore lost functions. Despite great progress in the past twenty years, we have gradually come to the consensus that the great complexity of tissue regeneration requires we approach problems in a systematic way in order to make breakthroughs. Currently, there are still three fundamental questions in tissue engineering that hinder translation and clinical success, including how to recreate microenvironments to control cell fate, how to promote vascularization for cell viability, and how to harness stem cells as cell source. More specifically, regarding microenvironments, how do we engineer a microenvironment to include both scaffold and signals, or accurately manipulate 3D biochemical, biophysical, biomechanical, bioelectrical and biomagnetic cell cues in a temporal and spatial manner to accelerate tissue regeneration and healing? Second, regarding vascularization, how do we meet the functional microvasculature requirement in which the distance between an individual cell and the nearest capillary vessels cannot be more than 100-300 μm or else the cell will suffer from insufficient nutrition and oxygen? Third, regarding stem cells, what is the origin of stem/progenitor cells and how fast and how many stem/progenitor cells can grow in a clinically relevant setting? In our lab, we use bio-inspired approaches to systematically address these challenges by integrating the expertise in materials science and engineering, chemistry, bone and stem cell biology, and orthopedic surgery.