Erika Cyphert
Department of Bioengineering, UC San Diego
Seminar Information
While pathogenic microbes are associated with poor health outcomes in orthopaedic surgery, recent findings have suggested that commensal gut microbes may be beneficial in promoting bone health. Novel biomaterial strategies to combat pathogenic microbes in periprosthetic joint infection will first be presented. To locally treat orthopaedic infections, antibiotics are incorporated into poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) bone cement. However, this strategy results in insufficient elution of drug to treat chronic infections and few antibiotics are compatible. To address these limitations, a composite PMMA-based material with polymerized cyclodextrin (CD) microparticles was developed. PMMA-CD composites were compatible with a broader range of antibiotics and able to treat chronic broad-spectrum infections. Next, the relationship between microbiome composition, bone acquisition, and bone tissue strength was studied using an in vivo model. Male and female C57Bl/6 mice had their gut microbiota altered using oral antibiotics for different periods of time until six months of age. Findings suggested that the gut microbiome can influence bone tissue strength after skeletal maturity and that it may be possible to improve bone matrix strength later in life through microbiome interventions.
Dr. Cyphert received her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University. As a graduate student, she was a NSF Graduate Research Fellow and received the PhD Student Award for Outstanding Research from the Society for Biomaterials. She spent time as a visiting researcher as a Fulbright Scholar at the Warsaw University of Technology (Poland) and Whitaker Foundation Grantee at Tokyo Women's Medical University (Japan). Her work focused on developing drug delivery systems for treatment of orthopaedic implant infection. As a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University and UC San Francisco she was awarded an NIH NRSA F32 fellowship. Her postdoctoral work focused on studying associations between the gut microbiome and bone strength. The Cyphert lab in the Bioengineering Department at UCSD develops drug delivery systems that target the microbiome.