Troops with facial wounds could be getting some help in Houston.

Local doctors at UT Houston and Rice University were just awarded a grant from the Department of Defense to develop regenerative treatments. It’s research that will eventually be used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But before that happens the procedure is helping heal the wounded at home.

“They had to remove part of my jaw bone,” patient Cyndi Lyons said.

Every time a bomb goes off in Iraq the soldiers suffer catastrophic injuries, sometimes to their faces.

Cyndi Lyons is not a soldier with a war injury. She had a tumor in her jaw.

But her latest round of treatment is part of new research that may help soldiers.

“I have a hip through of stitches here and all here,” Lyons pointed out.

Surgeries taking bone from other parts of her body to replace her jaw kept failing.

“Finally on the fourth surgery, the bone graft worked when they added growth factor to it,” Lyons said.

“We would have saved her multiple procedures if we had been able to regenerate bone in the lab,” UT Houston DOD Grant recipient Dr. Mark Wong said.

Researchers are studying planting smaller versions of these honeycomb-like structures inside the body to help generate bone growth

“A material will also be implanted that will allow for bone regeneration at the site through the creation of bone flap elsewhere,” Rice bioengineering graduate student Jim Kretlow said.

The extra bone is grown in places like the rib cage.  In one lab rat, on the left side you can see a hole in the skull, on the right side the bone is starting to grow back.

They’re even working on using cells to grow bone outside the body.

“These non-embrionic stem cells can be found in bone in your hip fat skin,” Dr. Wong said.

Meanwhile Cyndi Lyons is thrilled.

“Anything that makes them work is well worth it to save them the pain of going through so many surgeries,” said Lyons.

And that could help change the lives of soldiers injured in Iraq.