Université Laval's Research Centre: The Tissue Engineering Laboratory (LOEX)

Overview

Worldwide, the LOEX is one of the largest laboratories in regenerative medicine under one roof. The organizational structure of the LOEX at the operational level is pyramidal, from the technicians to the direction. Its organizational structure, at the scientific level, is more horizontal. The direction is composed of the Director, Dr. Lucie Germain and of an executive comitee. Researchers are on an equal playing field concerning the distribution of laboratory space and equipment sharing of both is mandatory.
Overall, the LOEX has aimed to increase its domestic and international competitiveness through a targeted recruitment of promising candidates and formal collaborations with world-renowned research centers (MIT, GeorgiaTech, Imperial College, CH Edouard Herriot Lyon, etc.). These collaborations will be executed following agreements established with the help and consent of the Research and Creation Vice-Rectorate and the creation of the International Office at Université Laval. LOEX will maintain its current vision of a high-level multidisciplinary research, which brings together scientific researches of a more fundamental nature while promoting interactions with the clinical environment in order to guide research projects to toward translational objectives.
With the help of clinical investigators at LOEX, some clinical and translational projects are already underway regarding skin substitutes as well as limbic eye stem cells for substitutes of corneal epithelium. Clinical trials are anticipated for bladder substitutes for near-term and, in mid-term for fat substitutes. We envision a more long-term substitutes in the vascular, valvular, ligament, bone and nervous areas.

Research themes

The specific research axes of the Center can be grouped as follows:

  1. Skin domain
  2. Cardiovascular domain
  3. Urogenital domain
  4. Adipose and connective tissue domain
  5. Orthopedic domain
  6. Corneal and ocular domain
  7. Wound healing and scarring domain
  8. Neurological domain