Daniel Kelly

Professor Daniel Kelly holds the Chair of Tissue Engineering at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). He received his BAI degree (Baccalaureus in Arte Ingeniaria) from TCD, and then completed an MSc and a PhD in the field of Biomedical Engineering. After working in the medical device industry (ClearStream Technologies), he joined the School of Engineering in TCD as a lecturer in 2005. In 2008 he was the recipient of a Science Foundation Ireland President of Ireland Young Researcher Award – Ireland’s most prestigious award for young academic scientists and engineers. In 2009 he received a Fulbright Award to take a position as a Visiting Research Scholar at the Department of Biomedical Engineering in Columbia University, New York. He is the recipient of five European Research Council awards (Starter grant 2010; Consolidator grant 2015; Proof of Concept grant 2017, 2023; Advanced grant 2021), which have led to the development of new single stage strategies for bone and cartilage repair and pioneering innovations in 3D (bio)printing for the regeneration of musculoskeletal tissues. He was elected a fellow of Trinity College Dublin in 2010 and was promoted to his current chair in 2017. The importance of this work was recognised by the European Society of Biomechanics (ESB), who awarded Prof Kelly’s group the 2012 Perren Award for best scientific paper. Other notable recognitions of Prof Kelly’s academic work include being awarded the Science Foundation Ireland Industry Partnership Award in  2019, the  Silver Medal of Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland (Bioengineering Section) in 2022 and the mid-term career award from the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International (TERMIS) EU society in 2023.

Prof Kelly is an internationally recognised leader in the fields of biofabrication, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. He has mentored 19 postdoctoral researchers and supervised 29 PhD students to completion; these lab alumni now work in industry and academia in the US, Africa, India, Australia and throughout Europe. Prof Kelly has also played a key role in establishing the Discipline of Biomedical Engineering in TCD, which now includes an undergraduate degree programme in Biomedical Engineering and an MSc in Biomedical Engineering.  He is also a past Director of the Trinity Centre for Biomedical Engineering (https://www.tcd.ie/biomedicalengineering/). He is also one of the founding Principal Investigators of the Advanced Materials and Bioengineering Research (AMBER) centre, a Science Foundation Ireland funded centre that links leading researchers in materials science and bioengineering with industry (https://ambercentre.ie/).

Key Research Achievements

Bone and cartilage tissue engineering

My lab has demonstrated that adult stem cells isolated from synovial joints can be used to tissue engineer functional cartilage grafts (10.1089/ten.TEA.2011.0544), especially when combined with bioreactors to mechanically stimulate these cells (10.1016/j.jbiomech.2013.12.006). We have demonstrated that it is possible to engineer zonal tissues such as articular cartilage by recapitulating the gradients in regulatory signals that during development and skeletal maturation are believed to drive spatial changes in stem cell differentiation and tissue organization (10.1371/journal.pone.0060764). Realising this required undertaking a series of fundamental studies to understand how chondrogenesis, hypertrophy and endochondral ossification is regulated by altered levels of oxygen and mechanical cues. We have demonstrated how complex tissues, such as the bone-cartilage interface, can be regenerated by designing tissue engineering strategies that recapitulate aspects of the normal long bone developmental process (10.1016/j.actbio.2012.11.008). We have also shown that it is possible to scale-up such developmentally inspired processes to regenerate large bone defects (10.1016/j.biomaterials.2018.01.057), or tissue engineer entire new bones (10.1089/biores.2015.0014) or biological implants for whole joint resurfacing (10.22203/ecm.v030a12). To extend the utility of this strategy, we have used 3D bioprinting to engineer scaled-up hypertrophic cartilage templates for bone organ engineering (10.1002/adhm.201600182).

Single stage strategies for bone and cartilage repair

In 2010 I was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) starter grant to develop novel stem cell based therapies to regenerate damaged articular cartilage. To realise the goals of this project, we first developed a range of decellularized extracellular matrix (ECM) derived scaffolds for articular cartilage (10.1016/j.actbio.2014.05.030), bone (10.22203/eCM.v033a10) and osteochondral defect repair (10.1016/j.biomaterials.2018.09.044), and have tested these scaffolds in relevant pre-clinical animal models. We then developed a single-stage, cell based therapy for articular cartilage regeneration by combining these biomimetic scaffolds with freshly isolated stromal cells sourced from patients in-clinic (10.1002/adhm.201400687). We recently completed an ERC proof-of-concept based on outputs from this project and are exploring different options to commercialise and clinically translate this research.

3D bioprinting for the regeneration of musculoskeletal tissues

In recent years we have utilised emerging biofabrication and bioprinting strategies to engineer structurally organised articular cartilage (10.1016/j.biomaterials.2018.12.028). We have also developed a range of different bioinks capable of supporting distinct cellular phenotypes, and used these bioinks to bioprint cartilage (10.1002/adhm.201801501) and meniscal (10.1002/term.2602) grafts. As part of my recently completed ERC consolidator grant, we modified such inks to provide them with unique mechanical properties compatible with load bearing environments (10.1088/1758-5090/ab8708). Furthermore, we bioprinted implants containing spatiotemporally defined patterns of growth factors and demonstrated that printed constructs containing a gradient of VEGF, coupled with spatially defined BMP-2 localization and release kinetics, accelerated large bone defect healing with little heterotopic bone formation (10.1126/sciadv.abb5093). We have also used 3D printing techniques to produce fibre-reinforced cartilaginous templates, and assessed the efficacy of such constructs in a caprine model of osteochondral defect repair (10.1016/j.actbio.2020.05.040).