Biomaterials for Regenerative Medicine
- PDF / 2,048,165 Bytes
- 8 Pages / 612 x 792 pts (letter) Page_size
- 96 Downloads / 231 Views
Biomaterials for Regenerative Medicine Samuel I. Stupp Abstract The following article is based on a presentation given by Samuel I. Stupp of Northwestern University as part of Symposium X—Frontiers of Materials Research on April 13, 2004, at the Materials Research Society Spring Meeting in San Francisco. Materials designed at the molecular and supramolecular scales to interact with cells, biomolecules, and pharmaceuticals will have a profound impact on technologies targeting the regeneration of body parts. Materials science is a great partner to stem cell biology, genomics, and proteomics in crafting the scaffolds that will effectively regenerate tissues lost to trauma, disease, or genetic defects. The repair of humans should be minimally invasive, and thus the best scaffolds would be liquids programmed to create materials inside our bodies. In this regard, self-assembling materials will play a key role in future technologies. This article illustrates how molecules are designed to assemble into cell scaffolds for human repair and provides examples relevant to brain damage, fractures of the skeleton, spinal cord injuries leading to paralysis, and diabetes. Keywords: biomaterials, cell scaffolds, self-assembly.
Introduction One of the great interdisciplinary scientific challenges for this century is regenerative medicine. This challenge requires the integration of emerging knowledge in the physical and life sciences with frontier engineering and clinical medicine to learn how to trigger the regeneration of failed human organs and tissues. Humans are living longer and aspire to a higher quality of life into an advanced age. As life spans rise, the world’s economies will have to keep humans functional as long as possible using regenerative medicine. At the same time, regenerative technologies based on new materials, devices, and cell therapies will create an interesting new economy, serving humans that are victims of trauma, disease, and congenital defects. As this economy develops, it will promote the transition in medical practice from the heavy use of pharmacology to treat biological dysfunction to biological regeneration. In the regenerative era of human repair, materials will transition from being providers of mostly mechanical functions to sophisticated regulators of biological activity. Currently, the same metals, ce-
546
ramics, and polymers used in technology at large are being used to replace failed blood vessels and heart valves, keep blood vessels open (metal stents), reconstruct joints with parts fixed to bone (hip and knee replacements), secure artificial teeth in the jawbone (threaded metal posts), release drugs in a sustained manner from polymer matrices, and protect skin damaged by burns. A recent article by Langer et al.1 describes the contrasting field of “smart biomaterials” relative to the traditional use of materials in human repair. In life sciences, the two closest scientific partners to the biomaterials science and engineering needed to make regenerative medicine reality will be stem cell bi
Data Loading...
