The Winners of the SciTech Festival Week Bone Strength

Congratulations to our winners!
1. Kristin Gleason- Rochester Middle School- 15.43 pounds
2. Ashley Von Dillen & Christie Miller- West Mifflin High School- 15.21 pounds
3. Alexa King & Jordan Garth-14.33 pounds
4. Abby- Moon Middle School- 14.11 pounds
5. Alex P.- Carnegie Elementary- 13.23 pounds

68th Regional Science and Engineering Fair

PTEI was proud to participate as judges in the 68th Regional Science and Engineering Fair, held on March 30-31, 2007 at Heinz Field.

Nearly 900 students from 100 schools in 11 western Pennsylvania counties participated in the 68th Pittsburgh Regional Science & Engineering Fair held Friday, March 30, 2007. The Pittsburgh Tissue Engineering Initiative (PTEI) and the McGowan Institute jointly sponsored a prize on tissue engineering and the winning project was "Responsiveness of Dermal Fibroblasts to Growth Factors" that was prepared by Shivani Mehta from North Allegheny High School.

Shivani, an 11th grade student, found normal wound healing to be a complex, highly regulated dynamic process requiring coordinated responses of epidermis, dermis, and signaling growth factors. Adult wounds heal with scar, but fetal skin wounds heal scarlessly.

Ms. Mehta’s aim was to study the cell migratory behavior of fetal fibroblast and adult fibroblast on a fibronectin-coated surface and to investigate the stimulatory effects of growth factors on these two cell populations. She found that fetal and adult fibroblasts migrate faster in response to growth factors, EGF and PDGF, whereas basal cell migration was inhibited by TGFb1 and TGFb3 in fetal fibroblast but not in adult fibroblasts.

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Thank you to the staff and judges LaShon Jackson, Timothy Maul, Julie Myers-Irvin, Julie Phillippi, and Priya Ramaswami; and congratulations, Shivani!