About this Research Topic
This research topic aims to highlight the complexity of regenerative processes using bone as a model system. Bone healing is a highly complex process that is tightly orchestrated and the immune reaction evolves as a crucial control system herein. Different phases with unique features follow one after another, are overlapping and mutually dependent and result in complete restoration of form and function if successful. Due to this complexity, there are many opportunities for the healing process to be derailed and result in an unsatisfactory outcome. Healing processes can be altered by genetic, metabolic, traumatic, and neoplastic bone disorders all of which are interdependent with immune cell functions Understanding dysregulation of bone healing and the decisive role of immune reactions remains an important, clinically-relevant problem.
Routine clinical fracture treatment is mostly dictated by fracture type and anatomical location without extensive consideration of a patient’s immune competence. To enable more patient-tailored, optimized treatments, a better understanding of the interdependencies and interfaces between the immune system as an overall regulator, and the nervous system, the vascular system, and the local mechanical environment within the healing tissue is urgently needed.
Within this Research Topic, we aim to assemble research papers and review articles that address clinical and preclinical research questions on the interfaces and interdependency of osteoimmunology and angiogenesis, cell metabolism, neural signaling, and mechanobiology during the bone healing process. In all of these processes, the immune system evolves as a regulating and determining factor of the healing progression. Combining topics such as mechanical stimuli of immune cells during bone healing or the interdependency of immune reaction and angiogenesis would be of special interest in this research topic. This research topic will specify that bone is more than just hard material and that a multitude of cellular subsets, a plethora of signaling pathways, a huge difference in scale (organ to molecule), and the interdependency of aspects (the bone, the immune system, cell differentiation, mechanics, neurology, vascularity, and metabolism) needs to be considered if we want to further our current knowledge of how regeneration works.
Routine clinical fracture treatment is mostly dictated by fracture type and anatomical location without extensive consideration of a patient’s immune competence. To enable more patient-tailored, optimized treatments, a better understanding of the interdependencies and interfaces between the immune system as an overall regulator, and the nervous system, the vascular system, and the local mechanical environment within the healing tissue is urgently needed.
Within this Research Topic, we aim to assemble research papers and review articles that address clinical and preclinical research questions on the interfaces and interdependency of osteoimmunology and angiogenesis, cell metabolism, neural signaling, and mechanobiology during the bone healing process. In all of these processes, the immune system evolves as a regulating and determining factor of the healing progression. Combining topics such as mechanical stimuli of immune cells during bone healing or the interdependency of immune reaction and angiogenesis would be of special interest in this research topic. This research topic will specify that bone is more than just hard material and that a multitude of cellular subsets, a plethora of signaling pathways, a huge difference in scale (organ to molecule), and the interdependency of aspects (the bone, the immune system, cell differentiation, mechanics, neurology, vascularity, and metabolism) needs to be considered if we want to further our current knowledge of how regeneration works.
Keywords: Bone healing, Regeneration, Osteoimmunology, Immune reaction, Osteomechanobiology, Mechanobiology, Osteometabolics, Metabolomics, Osteoneurology, Neural signalling, Osteovascularization, Revascularization
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