Growing ears from cartilage-producing cells on biodegradable scaffolds is a research area with challenges in scaffold development.

“my very first summer the first lab I worked in was the lab of an ENT surgeon and he was interested in growing septal chondrocytes so taking these chondrocytes these cartilage producing progenitor cells and growing ears and at the time a very very popular paper by a I'm trying to remember the name it was Langer and Vacanti two very famous guys in the space from MIT and Harvard and this was the year the year in the mouse yeah and we had that picture up in our lab and you know we were trying to replicate and of course the challenge at the time was coming up with biodegradable scaffolds”