Ms Jessica Roberts

A new approach to rebuilding bone

Globally, 178 million people break a bone each year. While many heal well, complex or traumatic fractures can result in long-term disability. Surgeons working to reconstruct missing or damaged bone face a particular challenge when patients don’t have enough healthy tissue to work with.

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New materials that help the body regrow bone are a promising area of research. But before these biomaterials can be used in real patients, we need to understand how the body’s immune system responds to them - particularly over time.

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What this fellowship sets out to explore

Supported by a Blond McIndoe Surgical Research Fellowship, plastic surgery trainee Jessica Roberts spent a year at the University of Glasgow modelling how the human immune system interacts with bone-regenerating materials. Working under the supervision of Dr Megan MacLeod and Professor Andrew Hart, Jessica used human cells (not animals) to study how T cells - a key part of the immune system - respond to these materials.

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She found that:

• T cells react in measurable ways to the biomaterial, with stronger and more mature immune responses appearing over time.

• Materials modified with fibronectin or laminin (proteins found in the body) triggered stronger immune responses - including inflammation - which also affected how bone-forming cells behaved.

• Her model can now be used to better understand, and potentially fine-tune, how the immune system responds to implants.

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Why this matters

While this is early-stage research, it adds an important piece to the puzzle of safely rebuilding bone. The model Jessica developed is one of the first of its kind to use human immune cells, and it avoids the need for animal testing. It could help researchers reduce the number of unsafe or unsuitable materials that reach clinical trials - protecting patients and saving time. It also provides a valuable tool for refining new materials before they are tested in humans.

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The wider impact

This work doesn’t yet change what happens in the clinic - but that’s expected. Like many important breakthroughs in medicine, this is foundational research that underpins future treatments.

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The project also highlights the real need for support in this space. Jessica’s PhD in Immunobioengineering was funded by the EPSRC, but no funding was available to support her salary - until the Blond McIndoe Fellowship stepped in. Thanks to this, she was able to complete her PhD full-time and is now continuing her research alongside her clinical training.

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Next steps

Jessica is now analysing how different inflammatory environments affect immune responses to the biomaterials, with the goal of identifying the specific immune cells involved. She also plans to investigate whether the materials can be modified to carry healing signals - such as anti-inflammatory proteins or factors that stimulate blood vessel growth - to improve how the body accepts and integrates them.