BME Seminar Series: Dr. Benjamin Walter, Spine Research Institute, The Ohio State University

"Mechanobiology of the Intervertebral Disc in Health and Disease"

Benjamin A. Walter, PhD.

Post-doctoral Researcher

Spine Research Institute & Department of Biomedical Engineering

The Ohio State University

Abstract: Low back pain is the leading cause of disability worldwide and is strongly associated with degeneration and structural deterioration of the intervertebral disc (IVD). The healthy IVD is an avascular and aneural joint that allows the transfer of load between vertebrae within the spine while also facilitating motion. Many factors are associated with the development and progression of painful IVD degeneration including abnormal mechanical loading and inflammatory processes.  However, limited models exist that allow investigation of how these factors interact to regulate normal homeostasis in health and the progression of tissue breakdown in disease.  Organ culture models, where whole IVDs are removed and cultured ex-vivo, are ideal model systems which maintain the natural cellular microenvironment and enable the examination of the interplay between mechanical loading and biology. During aging and disease there is an increase in inflammatory processes within the intervertebral disc that are thought to play a role in the progressive tissue breakdown and development of pain. However, there is a limited understanding how this inflammatory environment arises, how it influences the mechanical behavior of the tissue, and whether it contributes to the metabolic shift in response to dynamic loading which normally promotes tissue remodeling in health but can enhance tissue breakdown in disease.

Bio: Dr. Walter is currently a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Spine Research Institute and Department of Biomedical Engineering at The Ohio State University.  His current research focuses on understanding the role biomechanical factors play in the onset and progression of IVD degeneration and how such knowledge can be harnessed to diagnosis and treat spinal pathologies.

Dr. Walter graduated in 2008 with a BS in Biomedical Engineering from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and received a MS in Bioengineering from the University of Vermont in 2010.  In 2015, Dr. Walter received a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the City College of New York in New York City while conducting his doctoral research under Dr. James Iatridis at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.  Dr. Walter’s doctoral research focused on understanding how inflammation and mechanical load contributes to degenerative processes within the intervertebral disc (IVD). His research concentrated on developing whole IVD organ culture models in order to determine how an inflammatory environment influenced both the tissue’s mechanical behavior and the cellular perception of mechanical signals. After graduating Dr. Walter began his postdoctoral research at The Ohio State University under the mentorship of Dr. William Marras. His postdoctoral research focused on using magnetic resonance elastography imaging of the spine to non-invasively assess how the IVD’s material properties change with disease and developing MRE as a diagnostic tool to improve clinical treatment of spinal pathology.