LigaGen System From Instron Offers Advancement In Regenerative Medicine

Instron’s new LigaGen System offers a physiologic support structure to improve cell growth and maintenance in three dimensions, a technological advancement for tissue engineering and restoration science.

The LigaGen System’s technology is being hailed as revolutionary for its unique and supportive environment for cell growth with extremely flexible software and hardware that is totally adaptable. Users can create and recreate countless experimental protocols for a variety of different factors. What sets this system apart is that it can test under a host of different conditions and variables including: profile of application, force of magnitude and the frequency.

Instron’s LigaGen System can be used in many areas of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine which are areas of medicine that aim to replace or enhance tissue function that has been lost because of illness, age or injury.  Research has shown that cell and tissue stimulation during its development in vitro, as is possible with the LigaGen System, will make the resulting new tissue more like the native tissue it is trying to replace which is exposed to these biomechanical stimuli in vivo.

A clinical application for the LigaGen System exists in ligament grafting. Currently, allograft from cadavers or autologous ligament graft is used from other areas of the patient’s body. Cadaver allograft is associated with a high infection rate, while autologous graft is associated with harvest site pain and long recovery times. With tissue engineering technology, a patient’s own ligament cells could be cultured and grown on the LigaGen System in many of the same biomechanical conditions as the native ligament cells would be in their natural environment.