Comprehensively assessing engineered cartilage, or any engineered tissue, is a highly interdisciplinary undertaking. Expertise in areas such as molecular and cell biology, biomedical, chemical, mechanical, and electrical engineering, advanced imaging and computer modeling is required. As this spectrum of expertise generally cannot be provided by a single investigator or laboratory, there is a great need for collaboration and that has led to the concept of this multidisciplinary Center.

The immediate goals of this Resource Center, the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) Center for Multimodal Evaluation of Engineered Cartilage are to draw on our collective expertise to develop, validate, use, and disseminate a suite of testing technologies for monitoring and evaluating both the process of engineering cartilage and the end-product of this process.
The long-term goal of the Center is to provide a nexus of capabilities for researchers from local, national, and international labs (both academic and industrial), who can efficiently access information, receive assistance with planning and methods, and utilize specialized facilities to help evaluate their tissue.

We are starting this Center with a focus on TE cartilage; however, the majority of the testing methods we propose to develop have applicability in other contexts, and we solicit bids for collaborations which can leverage our technology.