Veteran Mark Weekley watched his Marine Corps friends get sent home for debilitating injuries while serving.
“There were quite a few injuries throughout the years of several people that ... wound up having to get medical discharges because they couldn’t perform the way they were supposed to,” Weekley, 53, said.
UF researchers are finding new ways to manufacture bones and tissue to help get soldiers back on their feet with a $15 million grant from the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute, said David Hahn, the chair of the UF Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
Over the next five years, soldiers could continue fighting in the military by having their limbs replaced with bio-manufactured material that performs as well as the original and is not rejected by the body, Hahn, 53, said.
“The long-term goal of organ and tissue replacement is truly the future of the intersection of engineering and medicine,” he said.
Hahn said the difficulty of creating living cells is twofold: to not damage the cells during printing and to allow the body to accept the artificial replacement.
Weekley said he is intrigued by the technology because he knows people who could have benefited from it during his time in the military.
“If something could have been done with their limbs to reconstruct or to help them, then any new technology would be a benefit to anyone and everyone in any branch of the military,” he said.
