SP55
Advances In Tissue Banking
Associate Professor Dr Aziz Nather
Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University Health System
Historical Development : The NUS Bone Bank was set up in October 1988 as a
research tissue bank. It quickly evolved into a service tissue bank in 1994. It was
officially inaugurated in 1995 as the NUH’s Tissue Bank. This became a hospital cost
centre in 1998. The bank has a wet processing laboratory, a dry processing
laboratory and a documentation room. NUH Tissue Bank became the national tissue
bank for Singapore, supplying bone and soft tissue allografts to all 8 major hospitals
in Singapore. The bank also became the regional training centre for the Asia-Pacific
Region in 1997, running the IAEA/ NUS Diploma Course for Tissue Banking
Operators. This is a one-year long distance diploma course with a terminal exam by
the National University of Singapore, and a Diploma Degree offered by the NUS. The
Diploma Course was converted into an internet course in 2004. The internet course
ceased to be funded by IAEA since 2007. Since then, NUH Tissue Bank continues to
run annual courses on its own budget and initiative, with the help of colleagues from
Malaysia and Indonesia, namely Doctor Norimah Yusof (radiation biologist, MINT,
Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia) and Doctor Nazly Hilmy (radiation biologist, Batan,
Jakarta, Indonesia). This year, the 15th Diploma Course will be held in September.
NUH Tissue Bank helped the Korean National Training Centre, headed by Professor
Yong Koo Kang to run Korean National Training Courses (KNTC) using the multimedia curriculum printed in Korean. The first KNTC was launched in 2003 and
annual courses were run till 2006. Doctor Nather acted as external examiner on
behalf of IAEA to run the Korean Training Courses. Research : NUH Tissue Bank
has performed several research studies on the Biology and Biomechanics of bone
allografts using the adult cat tibia as the experimental model. It has also conducted
studies on adult mesenchymal stem cells using bone allografts as the biological
scaffold using the adult rabbit tibia as the experimental model. Another tissue
engineering project involving animal bone grafts include the role of platelet-rich
plasma on the biological healing of bone allografts. These studies will be highlighted.
Future Prospects : There is great potential in the use of bone allografts as the
biological scaffold for the reconstruction of large bone defects using mesenchymal
stem cells. Bone substitutes such as calcium phosphate and polycaprolactone have
not been found to be strong enough to be used for such large bone reconstruction.
Other advances in bone allografts- allograft engineering will also be discussed.