The Second International Symposium on Biotechnology in Musculoskeletal Repair, sponsored by the AO Foundation, highlights recent progress across a wide range of clinically relevant topics in bone and cartilage de- and re- generation, therapy, and repair strategies. Technical programming encompasses advances in understanding healing, inflammation, angiogenesis, bone biology, and preclinical efficacy studies, within the context of developing new approaches to innovative patient management. Research related to modern fracture management must also focus on bone and cartilage diseases that increasingly impact aging populations through modern life styles (arthritis, osteoporosis, etc.). Peripheral research fields including haematology, rheumatology, endocrinology, clinical biochemistry, biotechnology and cell biology are increasingly exploited to provide new information that will ultimately improve patient management with fractures based on bone and cartilage diseases, or poor healing complications. Combinations of molecular and cellular diagnostics and therapeutics are increasingly exploited in this context.

The AO Foundation’s Biotechnology Advisory Board, organizing this event for the second time, seeks to highlight the roles of inflammation, infection, and angiogenesis in bone and cartilage repair, specifically to better understand the key signals, players, and physiological forces driving and inhibiting tissue healing. Increasing involvement of genetics tools and molecular diagnostics with preclinical models seek to provide insight into improving strategies for the bioengineering of bone and cartilage repair. Biomarkers and bioassays provide enormous amounts of new information but with little clinical validation to date. New cell-, protein-, and gene-based biotechnology approaches to musculoskeletal repair must integrate all of these resources and capabilities to optimize therapeutic outcomes in bone and cartilage.

Experts from all over the world have been invited to report their newest achievements in research and commercial translation to enable the clinicians’ quests for new patient treatments of tomorrow. Parallel breakout sessions on the first and third day will focus on important technical details and promote better networking within this research and clinical community.

Organizing Committee: The Biotechnology Advisory Board

Margarethe Hofmann, Jörg Auer, Steve Feinberg, Robert Guldberg, David Grainger, Elliott Gruskin, Norbert Haas, Dick Heinegård,  Robin Poole , Jill Urban