McKay Orthopedic Research Laboratory Information
The McKay Orthopaedic Research Laboratory officially opened in 1979 and has since been a thriving, multidisciplinary facility that occupies more than 22,000 square feet of space in Stemmler Hall in the Perelman School of Medicine. They are consistently ranked in the top 5 among Orthopaedic Departments nationally in terms of NIH funding. Their overall mission is to conduct high-quality fundamental and translational research and to train the next generation of leaders in our field. Below is a list of researchers at McKay who are open to medical student involvement in their labs.
The Mckay Laboratories website can be found here.
The goals of our research program in soft tissue mechanobiology and tissue engineering are to understand the physiologic and patho-physiologic processes that regulate the formation, maturation, and adult function of soft connective tissues. We believe that such an understanding will better direct our efforts to generate functional tissue replacements with a particular focus on articular cartilage and the knee meniscus. Our program utilizes various mechanical and biological testing modalities, scaffold fabrication techniques, and bioreactor culture conditions to explore these issues in both animal and human model systems. Specific information about current work in the Mauck Lab can be found by visiting the Ongoing Research Projects page.
The overall goals of our research program are to determine fundamental relationships and mechanisms of tendon and ligament injury, healing, repair, and regeneration and to use this information to develop and evaluate potential treatment modalities.
The primary goals of our research program are directed towards understanding the genetic, cellular, and mechanical mechanisms that regulate normal development, disease, and repair of tissues in the joint. Our lab focuses on 1) identifying the resident progenitor populations that contribute to normal growth, healing, and repair, 2) characterizing the mechanisms that control the expansion and differentiation of these cells, and 3) ascertaining the phenotypical markers that define the stages of differentiation from early stem/progenitors to mature cell types. These goals in combination will guide future therapeutic strategies and provide success criteria to assess efficacy moving forward.
The focus of our research program is the pathophysiology and treatment of degenerative and developmental disorders affecting the spine and synovial joints. The scope of our research includes basic mechanistic studies, translational studies in animal models, and clinical studies in human patients. We use cutting edge techniques in molecular biology, biochemistry, and bioengineering, coupled with the novel in vitro model systems to study disease mechanisms.
Our research in the translational space bridges the fields of tissue engineering, biomaterials, drug delivery, and stem cells, and is focused on arresting disease progression, restoring spine function and potentiating long term tissue regeneration. We use novel, naturally occurring and inducible large and small animal models to study disease etiology and evaluate therapeutics. Our multidisciplinary team includes biologists, bioengineers, clinicians and veterinarians. Our research program is funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the University of Pennsylvania and numerous private foundations and benefactors.
Our research investigates rare genetic disorders of heterotopic ossification. Heterotopic ossification is the formation of bone in the wrong place at the wrong time – cartilage and bone develop within soft connective tissues such as skeletal muscle and adipose tissue. Our work has demonstrated that these are disorders of mis-regulation of stem cell differentiation and loss of post-natal tissue maintenance that leads to aberrant formation of extra-skeletal bone and cartilage. We identified activating mutations in the ACVR1 gene as the cause of fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP) and inactivating mutations in GNAS as the cause of progressive osseous heteroplasia (POH). Our ongoing work explores the cellular and molecular basis of the dysregulated cell differentiation and bone tissue formation in these conditions using in vitro and in vivo models in order to understand the consequences of the mutations and to identify and test therapeutic strategies.
The Schipani Laboratory has a long-standing interest in the study of cartilage and bone development. Over the years, we have used cartilage and bone tissues as models to establish essential principles in the broader fields of G-protein coupled receptors and hypoxia biology.
The Qin lab studies the cellular and molecular basis for skeletal development, homeostasis, aging, and disease. Osteoporosis and osteoarthritis are two common skeletal diseases that cause huge economic and social burdens to our society. We utilize cutting edge techniques, including single-cell transcriptome analysis, 3D fluorescent imaging, and genetically modified animal models, to identify mesenchymal stem and progenitor cells at various musculoskeletal sites and investigate the function of progenitors and their descendants under normal and disease conditions. In collaborating with a team of multidisciplinary scientists and clinicians, our ultimate goal is to translate the studies on fundamental mechanisms of skeletal cell function into future clinical applications.
The Boerckel lab’s philosophy is that, if one wants to build a tissue, they should look to how the embryo builds that tissue. Thus the lab seeks to understand how mechanical cues influence embryonic development to enable tissue engineering strategies that recapitulate these processes for regeneration. Our work currently focuses on defining the roles of the mechanosensitive transcriptional regulators Yes-associated protein (YAP) and Transcriptional co-activator with PDZ motif (TAZ) in mechanotransduction, morphogenesis, growth, adaptation, and repair. In addition, we seek to develop new tissue engineering strategies for challenging injuries. We use a combination of engineered matrices and bioreactors to study mechanisms of cell mechanotransduction, genetic mouse models to study development and disease, and mouse and rat models to study repair and regeneration.