Dr. Conor Buckley, director of biomedical engineering at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, received a European Research Grant to study spinal regeneration on Dec. 10, reports The Irish Times.
He was awarded $2.2 million to develop an alternative treatment to target spinal pain outside of invasive surgery.
Dr. Buckley told The Irish Times he plans to inject cells into the spine to understand "the conditions of the center of the disk that would permit regeneration."
He aims to use engineering principles to better understand cell-based therapy, which could enable patients to delay undergoing an invasive spinal fusion procedure.