Stem cells ‘kicked’ to grow new bone

4 April 2013 Last updated at 20:01 ET By Ken Macdonald BBC Scotland Science Correspondent

Are your stem cells not doing what you want them to? Give them a kicking.

That is the new technique developed by a Scottish research team, a technique which could help patients with spinal injuries grow new bone.

They call it "nanokicking". It plays on the potential our bodies' stem cells possess to turn into any other kind of tissue - blood, muscle or, in this case, bone.

Persuading stem cells to become bone has been done in the laboratory before. But existing techniques typically involve complex and expensive engineering or cocktails of chemicals.

The Scottish team, drawn from the universities of Glasgow, Strathclyde and the West of Scotland, is instead mimicking a natural process - when broken bones need to knit, they vibrate.

In his laboratory at Glasgow University, Dr Matt Dalby opens an incubator to show me how they do it.

"In here we have the cells being nanokicked," he says.

"Here in the Petri dishes, the stems cells are growing.

"The piezo ceramics that are attached underneath are kicking the cells a thousand times a second, by around about 20 nanometres."

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Stem cells 'kicked' to grow new bone