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GradLIFE Podcast
Building Scaffolds with Kyle Timmer
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Kyle Timmer is on a mission to help your body heal faster after an injury.
A PhD student in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Illinois, Kyle took home the grand prize at Research Live!, a fun, fast-paced competition where graduate students showcase their research. Research Live! challenges participants to give a three-minute research talk that explains their project to a general audience. Dazzling both the audience and judges, Kyle showcased his work, "A Biomimetic Scaffold to Improve Rotator Cuff Shoulder Repair." His new approach, which uses structures that mimic natural tissue to enhance healing, could revolutionize how doctors treat shoulder injuries, potentially shortening recovery time and improving outcomes for patients worldwide.
Fresh off his win, Kyle joined GradLIFE podcast host John Moist to discuss the art of science communication, working with stem cells, the ins and outs (and highs and lows) of lab work, and more.
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Show Notes:
Watch Kyle's Winning Research Talk from Research Live! 2024
Timmer Receives Grand Prize at Research Live!
Learn More About Research Live!
Read More About the Winners of Research Live! 2024
Harley Research Lab
Harley Research Lab - People
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering @ Illinois
Check out the Graduate College @ Illinois
Listen to the GradLIFE Podcast
Read the GradLIFE Blog
Hi, I'm John Moist, and you're listening to the GradLife podcast where we take a deep dive into topics related to graduate education at the University of Illinois. Urbana Champaign, I want you to think about your shoulders. Now. You'd be forgiven if your shoulder isn't something that you spend a lot of time thinking about. But if you've ever had an issue with your rotator cuff, you'll be intimately aware of how complicated and delicate that part of our bodies can be. Today, we've got an interview with someone working to make it easier for your body to heal from a rotator cuff injury. Kyle Timmer is a PhD student in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Kyle's designing biomaterials to increase our musculoskeletal systems regenerative capacity. Oh, and there's one more thing, Kyle won last year's Research Live, a competition that challenges graduate students to share their research with the general public in only three minutes. This is a good one. We chat about biomimetic scaffolding, science communication, freeze dryers and more. Enjoy. I want to start out with a fact that you shared at Research Live that really jumped out to me. You said if I could think of four people over 60, yeah, at least one of those folks is likely to have suffered a rotator cuff tear. Yeah. That blew my mind, because you don't often think of things like that, like, Oh, if I can think of four folks, one of them has had this happen to them. So I'm going to start real simply tell me who you are and what you do, and then what is a rotator cuff tear?
Kyle Timmer:Yeah, so my name is Kyle Timmer and so, yeah, scary enough. It's now my fifth year in the PhD program of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. And yeah, as we said, I'm, you know, my research focuses on the design of these biomaterials for this regenerative capacity of our musculoskeletal system and some of the different tissues within it.
John Moist:So if somebody I know experienced a rotator cuff tear, I've got a general idea that involves my shoulder for something that rotates. But what does it actually mean when somebody gets a rotator cuff tear?
Kyle Timmer:Yeah. So as anything with the body, it's a whole lot more complicated than just this single instance, or this single definition the rotator cuff. It's yeah, as you put it, it's like this. It's a grouping of like muscle and tendon in our shoulder for different major parts or different muscle groups that really control how we're able to move the shoulder, especially like raising it up, moving it around. Because, you know, our shoulders have tons of mobility, and you can have, you know, a broad range of different things that goes wrong with this. You can have general tendinitis. You can have, actually, I went in at one point earlier this year for like, a rotator cuff impingement, where you've just got like, a little bit of bone kind of pinching or just pushing in just the right wrong way that, you know, it gets a little inflamed, it brushes up more, gets a little more inflamed, and, yeah, weird stuff like that. But so a rotator cuff tear is when of one of those four, like major kind of muscle tendon bone groupings, like the supraspinatus being one of the main ones, which is, like the top one, okay, but when one of those kind of pulls or tears away from the bone a little bit, and as I mentioned a little bit in the talk, and kind of going back onto that fact you can this can happen in a number of ways. This can happen, like from an acute injury, like from, you know, you damage it while playing sports or something like that. But, and that's more similar to another interfacial tissue that the ACL, which I think a lot of us are more familiar with. You know, in the ACL, you've got this ligament to bone junction, that if that breaks, is hard for the body to repair. And so for the rotator cuff, it's similar, where you have this tendon to bone junction, that when the kind of tendon which is what connects muscle to bone is kind of torn away, when you have this tear that's close to that interface. That's where it's hard for the body to heal. And yeah, as I said, that can happen from like an acute injury, but with the rotator cuff, what's almost more common is for that to happen just as we get older, you know, we use our shoulders so much, lot of repeated use, that by the time people hit their 50s 60s, especially if they're working in like, a heavy manual labor job or something like that. There's just been so much shoulder use that over time it can start to degrade, sure.
John Moist:So I'm more likely to be at risk for these issues if I have a job that's causing me to use that motion over and over and over again, or if I play tennis right, or if I play Baseball, things that require a lot of really active shoulder movement. Actually, most sports, I think of off the top of my head, require really intense shoulder movements. So I could stress that, what are the challenges in treating those? Because I imagine if a tendon has come dislodged, if something serious has happened in there that doesn't just, you know, go away very quickly. So what are the challenges?
Kyle Timmer:So I mean, there are a lot of really cool surgical techniques out there. We've moved, especially in the past 20 years, really far away from, you know, them having to, like, open up your shoulder and do a lot of work there they can, you know, use arthroscopic repair, get like, these, like little camera in there, have them do everything just with these small incisions. And that's great for when you have these smaller tears. But a lot of times, some of the bigger challenges are when a patient is older, that the body doesn't heal as well. These can go unnoticed or untreated for a fair bit. So the longer you wait, you can get this like fatty infiltration. You can have, like, kind of the tear becoming bigger, or almost more pulling away, and it gets more deformed. I mean, if you imagine, you know, you make a little rip in a piece of paper, it starts off something you could easily patch with tape, but the more you move that paper, the more stuff goes around. It gets bigger, it gets more deformed. Other stuff goes on. So a chronic injury, versus just one that just happened is definitely an aspect that challenge as well. And then one of the main challenges that my research focuses on is on just the general challenge of the body healing that interfacial region our bodies are really good at healing some things and are really not good about healing other things. And junctions between tissues are something that our body can sometimes really have a challenge with. So like bulk tendon or bulk bone, is usually easier for our body to heal, but that kind of complex gradient in between that connects them, it doesn't really do well with
John Moist:interesting so your work has been attempting to solve that problem. So you're working in those areas where maybe our body struggles to heal itself, and that, by the way, as a quick aside, is fascinating to me, right, that there are you said a bulk bone issue is easier for the body to repair. Well,
Kyle Timmer:I mean, you think you break a bone, that's something that obviously sucks and isn't fun, but it's not something we necessarily treat as this huge it's more of an inconvenience than it is, like this huge clinical problem. You know, they set the bone back, and they basically just hold them close together, and they're in the right place. And we say, yep, our body's going to do what it needs to do itself. You know, you wear a cast, and you kind of just wait for your arm to heal. So that's a chance like something that the body can just kind of do now. I mean, obviously, if you lose a ton of bone, if, say, you get in a car accident, and your jaw isn't just fractured, but is, like, you know, really smashed, or something like that. That's a much greater scale. That's a much different problem. And on it, actually, we are some different people in my lab do research on making materials that are specific for that, like for large areas of bone loss, like a cleft lip, cleft palate, or like, needing to have bone removed because of cancer or something like that. So they make like materials that would be helping to better replace those larger defects,
John Moist:yeah, in those smaller places that you talk about, that's where your work comes in. Yes. So I want to dive into this word that, frankly, I really love saying over and over again. If I could take every opportunity I could to say a biomimetic scaffold, that's a fun one, isn't it? Did you aside? Did you know when you picked it that it was a fun one? Did you know you're like, that's a good one to say?
Kyle Timmer:I you know, sometimes you're just kind of playing with different words or different titles, and then you hit one and you're like, oh, that's that is kind of fun. Yeah.
John Moist:Okay, good. I'm glad that you did have that moment, because that's what I thought.
Kyle Timmer:It's also one of those things where, when you work in that field so much, you hear those words so often, it sometimes loses a bit of that extra fun. And then when, like, you know, you present for something like this campus wide competition where, you know, I'm talking to people in all lines of work, and not just my very specific niche. It's, very fun seeing people get that new excitement for words again. But I can, you know, have it, haven't always remembered, or have gotten a little just, you know, overused. You see people saying
John Moist:it after you say it, you say kind of mouthing biomimetic scaffold, well, without any further ado. Then tell me a little bit. What is a biomimetic scaffold? What's your
Kyle Timmer:Yeah, so, tissue engineering is a field that has work?
John Moist:So you're not just designing a thing to help been growing a lot in the past few decades, and this main idea is we're trying to be able to create things that are helpful in the body, that are artificial. You know, you hear talk of people trying to develop an artificial heart, or people support the recovery, or the thing to do the recovery in a trying to develop, like artificial skin grafts, or things like that. You could consider all of these in like a tissue engineering concept. And as I talked about a little bit in the talk this, our scaffolds are kind of, you know, in some ways it's just a name we give to a certain class of material, but that kind of comes from the idea that they both have this structural support aspect, you know, like scaffolding and construction, but then they're also a biomaterial that's meant to help with actual healing itself. So it's not just like an inert stabilizer, it's also something that has some level of healing capacity, and whether that's because it emits or secretes a drug, whether that's because it has certain structural or compositional properties, whether that's because it has maybe cells already loaded into it that will do certain things that can depend a lot on the exact design of whoever's making it. way you're trying to put the two together. Yeah, let's make, like scaffolding around a building, something that supports the work we're doing, but it's also the construction material doing the work that's fascinating. Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating.
Kyle Timmer:The example that I used in my talk, that you know, I'm a little proud of, is that the scaffolding works. Yeah, it works like the scaffolding construction and it and then, in this case, our cells are the workers, so the material doesn't really do anything. We call it an instructive material, because it provides cells with the instructions on how to do what they need to do. Like, you know, if you've got workers creating a house, you know, you need something that not only provides the struts and the things for them to build the walls, the foundations add the things on, but they need to know what to build, where to build it, how to do those things, and what needs to go, where, and so that's kind of our goal with this is mimicking how the body usually will look, or the thing that we want to see, so that the cells have this baseline idea of what's supposed to be there, and then can work on actually replacing with the final product. Fascinating.
John Moist:So I'm intrigued by that idea of instructive material. Yeah, like you're handing somebody the blueprints as well, yeah, and saying, Okay, here's what it look like, and also, here's how you make it, sort of encouraging my body to do it for me, right? Talk to me a little bit more about that. What that instructive material is, yeah,
Kyle Timmer:it's, it's tricky. And I think it goes back to this sense that, I think a common misconception when I tell people say that I work with stem cells, or that I work with tissue engineering, as you know, we see in the movies, you know, Wolverine, or all these stuff where it's like, oh, cool. Like, you know, if people, if we can already have, like, say baseline, like, we know how to say, make a dolly, the sheep, like a clone of that. Or we can grow this stuff, like, what's to stop us? Or, why can't we just grow a new hand? Or grow all this stuff? And it's hard, because our cells, in some ways, are incredibly smart, and in some ways are not, in the sense that even if I can say, Wow, cells, I wish you could just turn into a new hand or turn into this thing, they can't do that. They can't just know what needs to be there and do that. So we work with then trying to make materials that have the right, say, the right structure, the right because cells are super sensitive. They will notice if they're on a material that is stiffer or less stiff. They will notice if they're on a material that has pores that are more circular, shaped or more long and skinny. They will notice if there are certain signals bound into the material that our body uses, in general, to help guide cells. It will notice if the material is being they will notice that the material is being stretched, like if it's undergoing what we call strain. They there are so many things that in signals that they can take from our environment. So, you know, there's a lot of things we know about this, but in some ways, it also just comes down to a little bit of trial and error, saying, Okay, what if we make a material, you know, what if we make five different scaffolds at a range of stiffnesses? How do cells behave on those different materials? And then we take the best one, and we can move from there. And it's, it's kind of an iterative process of kind of almost trial and error. Because even though we know so much about how cells behave, there's so much that we don't know, to the point where we can't just say, All right, here's the perfect recipe for this thing, and that's, you know, where the research comes in, is learning and figuring out how they respond to different environments and picking the best ones. So
John Moist:in order to make the best blueprints, you have to figure out what material they need to be in trial and error. Do that over and over and over again. Wow. So two things I want to follow up on. From there, you're answering this so well, I always have follow up questions. Talk a little bit more about how you're using stem cells, because I think you're right. There's this idea. Idea of stem cells as being part of the mythos of science fiction. Yes, right. Tell me how you use stem cells.
Kyle Timmer:So, I mean, there's another thing with the stem Yeah. cells too, in that it's thrown around as a very general term, when, in fact, there's lots of different kinds of stem cells, depending on how capable they are of turning into other things where they're found, that sort of thing. You know, as we know, there have been ethical concerns with stem cells derived, say, from human embryos or stuff like that, in the past. But we also, as adults, have stem cells in our bone marrow that are useful for our blood, like our hematopoietic stem cells, or the ones that I use, which can just also be found in bone marrow or even in fatty tissue, called mesenchymal stem cells. And these are stem cells that can't say, turn into heart tissue or brain tissue. They're pretty much specifically focused on the musculoskeletal system, so turning into cells that are useful for bone or tendon or fat or stuff like in that regard. So we work with these cells in kind of the design of our materials, because we're trying to make ones that will influence those stem cells to turn into the type of cells that we want. So say we're making a bone scaffold. We want a scaffold to instruct these mesenchymal stem cells to turn into cells called osteoblasts, which are really important for the formation of bone, because the body employs these stem cells for healing in a lot of aspects. If you get, say, a bone injury, it's not just going to be the body sending out all its other osteoblasts to come and make new bone. It's also sending out Mesenchymal stem cells that will be differentiating and improving the healing process, because these cells are not just important for differentiation, but also send out a ton of important signals for the immune responses or things like that. So they have a lot of dual purposes, but So those are kind of the cells that we're trying to target and focus on. The
John Moist:way you're talking about this. It is, I'll admit, a little hard to get a picture of what the work would look like. Right. Because you're talking about doing tons of iterative experiments. I'm gathering the idea that you're going to take a look at how many different materials work. What does that look like
Kyle Timmer:in the lab? So to take paint a picture of kind of what we do the first thing to make these scaffolds is that they're comprised of a lot of different types of bio based materials. So, you know, collagen is a big one, because, say, if we're making a bone material, we want to be highly mineralized, just like bones. So we'll use different salts and different other chemicals that have a lot of calcium or phosphorus. To really build this specific recipe, we basically put it in a big blender that will grind it all up for a long time. It's honestly a pretty annoying part of the process, and then we freeze dry these so that creates something that's really porous and essentially just like a sponge. So if you want to think of like the bone based materials that I work with. Just think of like a little white sponge that's, you know, about half an inch, just a little cylinder like you'd get out of. We actually use biopsy punches to get them into the exact dimensions we want. So fascinating, yeah, so we'll get it as, like a sheet, you know, we pour this liquid into a tray, freeze dry it. We get the sheet. Then we take biopsy punches so that we have the exact dimensions we want. We just punch it all out, and then we will move on to experiments with it. So we'll soak them in a couple different things to make them a little bit stiffer, we will and then we'll put these stem cells onto them. We'll culture them in an incubator. So they're kept at 37 degrees Celsius, at a set range of carbon dioxide and some other conditions that are just similar to what the body is like and what cells need. And then at different time points, say so after seven days, after 14 days, after 21 days, we'll take a couple out. We'll do different tests on them. See how, you know, look at how happy the cells are, how fast, how much the cells have grown, what say, what things they're showing us, or what things they're doing. Because cells will they will secrete different signals. They will send messages to each other. They will start making these building blocks or other things, so we can measure all those with different assays and get a better sense of how those cells are reacting to the environment.
John Moist:What's funny about that is that if you asked me what this research looks like, I would not have imagined it's you in front of a large freeze dryer. Yeah, right. But, but there it is, right? Everything looks like a big washing machine. Well, yeah. Well, freeze dryers are kind of fascinating machines, right? Like they lower the temperature and then raise it and then pull a vacuum to get all the moisture out of something. Yeah, fascinating. Okay, all
Kyle Timmer:right, honestly, yeah, picture me in front of a blender, in front of a Big Freeze dryer, or in front of a biosafety cabinet. It's just just a, you know, basically a big shelf with a glass door in front that I can stick my hands in and helps prevent contamination and all that,
John Moist:sure, so you can manipulate what's inside the container without touching it with your actual hands. Oh,
Kyle Timmer:so we still do glove. It's just to prevent, like, a lot of airborne stuff or other things from contaminating. So it uses, like it pulls a vacuum and helps prevent just air of non filtered air, and that sort of air you don't want inside the chamber, because, you know, even our air has got a fair amount of bacteria or other stuff potentially in it, or, you know, you're breathing, you've got aerosolized saliva or stuff like that. Absolutely
John Moist:and and although this is not entirely a comfortable subject, the many bits of bacteria on your skin, oh, on in your breath, right? Like these are all tons of tons of little guys living around us, and best if we can control that environment, yeah, so I've got a couple more questions with you to finish out here. Let's move a little bit more general. You do work that is advanced. It's smart. I'll just throw you a compliment there. Oh, thank you. What's it like to take that work
Kyle Timmer:It's it's a cool challenge, and I think it's very that you've been thinking about for years, you've been in that world. You're in your five year PhD, you have been around this material for a while. I have what's it like to take that and boil it down for something like Research Live to sort of freeze dry it, if you will, and get the important stuff out. Thank you for going with me on that joke. interesting, because in this field of research, we're very used to preparing presentations or posters or that sort of thing. But these are all usually focused on our specific field. You know, if I go to a conference, I'll go to a conference for the Society for Biomaterials, where it's all people who do all different work purely with biomaterials. So I don't need to explain too much the concepts of why this is important, or why we might do something else, and people just really delve into that science. Because, you know, this point of these conferences is finding the new ideas connecting with people in that sense. And so it was an interesting challenge for this making a presentation of an entirely different sort for a much more general audience. And it's a topic that I've thought about before, because obviously, you know, you go home for the holidays and your family says, Oh, what are you working on? You're like, Okay, well, how do I mean, like, you know, my family's full of relatively smart people, but it takes more than just intelligence to, you know, have someone explain something in a super niche, random, advanced field. So it's definitely a challenge that I've thought of before and have tried my hand at, and I think I've done okay in the past, but this was definitely more of an opportunity for me to really focus on it and prioritize it and try my best at you know, all right, what is the best comparison or metaphor that I can make for this? What is the most distilled, simple, but still getting the point across way that I can convey this information. And I had a I had a couple family members or friends tell me, after watching that that it was like, wow, I finally understand your research now, or something like that, which was always nice to hear. But even in practicing this, I'd actually done it for both my parents and both sets of grandparents as because I figured that was the best, a good like, testing audience of like, okay, if grandma can watch this and like, be like, Okay, I think I kind of get what you're putting down. That's, that's a good sign. Very
John Moist:good sign. I think I want to drill down on one thing about your presentation, you had an excellent use and I will make sure I link that presentation the show notes so folks can catch up on what I'm about to say. You used metaphor really well. When I talk to folks about science communication, something that comes up often is that you have to make things understandable by portraying them in terms folks know? Yeah, right. And you did that really well. What led you to think in terms of metaphors like that? When you say scaffolding, you call our minds to construction. You call our minds to things we know. What inspired you to do that? Honestly,
Kyle Timmer:I can't think of like an exact reasoning or motivation. I've just I think, as you said, it does a really good job of conveying these ideas, because people are always going to better understand the things that are familiar. You know, they're better like you can explain and spend 15 minutes talking about, for instance, what this specific material is and what it does and what it looks like, or it could just say to you, I work with jello, because that's 95% accurate for the certain material. It's literally, it's a gelatin based hydrogel. And so it's just, I it's not really a skill we use too much in, like our scientific presentations, like at conferences, but just, I've always, I think it really helps convey the information. Though, I will be honest sometimes in the movies, I. Hate those ones, or it's like, okay, you know, here's the eraser, here's the like, movies love to dumb it down, I feel like, to an even, even more extensive extent. And so I really wanted to make sure, whenever I'm choosing these metaphors or these comparisons, that even though it is far simplified, it's still my brain is like, all right, I want it to be as accurate as possible, though, because, you know, I want to make sure I'm giving the right idea, even if no one else, other than the people in my field, would be like, Oh, well, technically, that's not really a great
John Moist:Yeah, yeah. Well, I think about it in terms of I've
Kyle Timmer:I mean, it's had its ups and downs. I think it described my own work. I think about it in terms of those old algebra tests you used to take in high school where you had to show all of your work. Yes, right? When you're with the community that knows what you do, it's about showing all of the work. I want to spread out many different chalkboards show you everything I did. The more somebody doesn't know, the more it's about hiding your work. Yes, hide all the complicated stuff behind a metaphor that you've taken, I'm sure, no small amount of time to think through, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'm gonna ask you a quick, sort of rounding up question. You've been at Illinois now five years. How have you found being a graduate student at Illinois, and if you had to give somebody advice who was starting out and they were brand new. What advice would you give them? Yeah, overall has been a good experience. I think it's been a decent place. I've really liked the research that I do in the lab, that I do it with my advisor and my group members the biggest thing. And I think when I was considering grad school, my undergraduate advisor had essentially told me, you know, undergraduate is a sprint. Grad school is a marathon, in the sense that for undergraduate, every semester, you're kind of just rushing to get these grades, but like at the end of those three months, you know, you might have a couple courses that depend on certain things, but for the most part, it's done. It doesn't really matter. But grad school, you know, three months is nothing. You know, that's like two failed experiments, but, like, I'm still working on that same project. I'm still doing that same thing. And so, yeah, you're gonna have really great times with the science. You're gonna have really poor times with the science, and so, but just kind of coming in with that understanding and also that motivation. Because that's, I think the biggest thing is, if you say to yourself, This is something I want, this is something I want to do, this is something I feel passionate about, that's going to be one of the biggest factors in driving your success is getting you through those bad times to enjoy the better ones.
John Moist:Yeah, how do you focus on those good times? Because you said there are going to be good moments with the science. And I heard some emotion behind your voice when you mentioned failed experiments. I think so. How do you keep your focus on the good times?
Kyle Timmer:It's it's hard. I think everyone will have just, you know that period of months on end, sometimes where just the idea you had isn't working, or the thing that's supposed to be happening or happened before isn't happening now, and you don't know why. You don't know if it's you, if it's something else, or it's hard to know. But I think, yeah, having a good community as well is really important, because grad students are well aware that we all fail at times. All have issues. So being able to surround yourself with people that you can be honest with on those failures and that they know and understand what's going on, versus, just say, a community of everyone thinking you always have to be successful all the time. That's obviously not gonna be healthy. And then I think, yeah, being able to lean on other people, friends outside of grad school, as well, your advisors, everything. I think that can make a really big difference, because it's easy to get sucked into your own little world of I'm the only one doing this work, or I'm doing this, and somehow I can't do it. But being reminded that science is both, is also a community, and also that you're doing stuff no one else has done before, that's the point of research. So if it were easy and if anyone could do it, it wouldn't be worth you doing.
John Moist:It has been great to have you today. Thanks so much for coming in, and I'm sure folks have learned a lot from listening to this. And also thanks for your comments on science communication and how you do what you do, because I think you're particularly talented at it, and I hope folks learned from your advice today. Well, thank you. Thank you. GradLife is a production of the Graduate College at the University of Illinois. If you want to learn more about the grad life, podcast, blog, newsletter, or anything else graduate college related, visit us at grad.illinois.edu for more information. Until next time I'm John moist, and this has been the GradLife podcast you.