Rachel Nordberg, Ph.D.
Faculty Candidate
Postdoctoral Fellow
Dept. of Biomedical Engineering
University of California Irvine
Seminar Information
To date, the Food and Drug Administration has approved 27 cellular and gene therapy products for clinical use, and this list includes only a single product for cartilage repair. Although there have been significant advances in the field of cartilage tissue engineering within the past several decades, the path toward translating new cell therapy products remains challenging due to intrinsic complexities within the regulatory process. In this talk, I will discuss recent efforts to further the translation of self-assembled cartilage with particular emphasis on the repair of the facet joint, a severely understudied joint that causes pain in approximately 7% of the US population. First, I will describe research related to cell banking of highly passaged chondrocytes for the purpose of conducting studies that will support an Investigational New Drug application to the FDA for cartilage repair products. I will then narrow to applying these technologies for the specific indication of facet joint repair. I will describe the characterization studies to establish design criteria for facet joint implants and the tissue engineering efforts that have been conducted to replicate the native facet properties in a shape-specific osteochondral implant. I will conclude my talk by discussing the regulatory pathway forward for cartilage repair products and the current landscape of cell therapy product translation.
Rachel Nordberg is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focus is on the translation of cell therapy products with a particular emphasis on musculoskeletal tissue engineering. She earned her B.S. in Bioengineering from Lehigh University, before attending Cornell University for her M.Eng. in Biomedical Engineering. She obtained her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and North Carolina State Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering. In 2018, she began her postdoctoral research at the University of California, Irvine where she was awarded a three-year TL-1 NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowship from the UCI Institute of Clinical and Translational Science.