In osteoarthritis, as well as in other disease states, the oxidative-reductive (redox) balance—the ratio of oxidants to antioxidants—in articular cartilage gets out of whack.
With a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Mechanical Engineering Assistant Professor Corinne Henak will identify the effect of mechanical loading on redox balance in articular cartilage. She is using a technique called optical redox imaging, which will allow her to evaluate changes in redox balance that happen during shorter timescales after a mechanical stimulus is applied.
“There’s a big question about how the redox balance changes over these short time periods, such as from five to 30 minutes, and this is something that hasn’t been explored before. It’s really a fundamental knowledge gap,” Henak says. “With this project, we want to understand how quickly the redox balance shifts in cartilage, and how that might interplay with different disease states or different types of stimuli.”
Findings from this research will improve understanding of cartilage behavior and could eventually enable better screening of treatments for joint disease. And in the future, this research could inform new therapeutic approaches, such as pharmacological treatments, for patients who have suffered an injury like an ACL rupture that predisposes them to early-onset osteoarthritis.
For the education and outreach element of Henak’s CAREER award, she will create a peer mentorship group for mechanical engineering undergraduates, which will help support student success. In addition, Henak plans to develop a new course focused on teaching mechanical engineering undergraduates the skills they need to conduct research in the lab. “By giving more undergraduates the opportunity to engage in research activities and develop this skillset, the experiential learning in this course will also help students build their identity as engineers,” she says.
Henak will also participate in established K-12 outreach programs and events like Engineering EXPO to introduce students to mechanobiology through interactive demonstrations.