[MUSIC] So biomaterials can mean a lot of

things to a lot of different people. The original versions of

biomaterials were thought to be inert materials you could implant in
the body to help in the healing response. And so these were typically static
implants, we think about artificial knees, artificial hips, the metal fixation
devices they use in craniofacial surgery where you have to support the mandible if
you're taking out a big bit of the bone after a tumor, for example. Instead of
having the bone grow back, there are these strips of metal you can
implant to hold everything in place. And so the original idea of a biomaterials
is there is something inert, they could sit in a tissue or
be affixed to a tissue and wouldn't drive any sort of long term
chronic inflammatory response or infection response and
that's changed over the years. It's become more active materials. So now we have,
instead of a piece of metal being used
as an artificial heart valve, you have decellularized heart valves that are used
that have actual tissue properties to them that cells can grow back into and
produce a native tissue again. We have biomaterials that my lab works in. The idea
being some sort of porous
structure that you could use to support cells. So we're interested in creating
a kitchen sponge like materials or Jell-O like materials that are
three-dimensional, that can hold cells in defined architectures will
provide signals to them. They can be implanted in
the body to help heal. But also recently, the idea of biometriotics
extended outside of the body. One of the largest and fastest growing areas of
research these
days is this idea of tissue on a chip and this idea where you could take the
complexity of a tissue, and take out of that a defined sequence of keys that
you can produce in the laboratory. So you could grow tissues in the lab and
this has a lot of advantages in terms of using them to test new drugs to measure
cytotoxicity, something that is really difficult to do unless you have some sort
of tissue like structure you work with. And so, biomaterials can mean a lot of
things to a lot of different people. But from the basis, it's this idea of some
sort of material structure whether it is a piece of metal, whether it's a sponge
type material, whether it's a dense gel or whether it's a flat substrate. It is
some sort of material property that
has some sort of biological feature to it whether it's implanted in the body or
used
in the laboratory, there's a wide range of what biomaterials might be and a wide
range of what research has done with them. And what that means is there's also a
lot
of really exciting advances that will be happening in the next few
years as we continue to push the definition of what
a biomaterial actually is. My lab focuses on the idea of
developing instructive biomaterials. And so what that means is that you have a
cell that could be sitting in a vacuum and is going to be doing something, and the
cells are the building block of all
the tissues, and organs in our body. And for a long time, the idea of materials
that were used in medicine, they were meant to be inert or passive, so that it
allowed the cells to do whatever the cell was going to do and the material was
there
to support the cells in some manner. So, one example might be
an artificial hip implant. The goal is not to instruct the cells
in the femur to do anything new, it's simply to replace the femur
with a lump of titanium and that makes the joint functional, but it's not providing
any instructive
signal to the surrounding tissues. And so the sort of paradigm shift
that we're working on is how do you design materials that
are in cells instructive, that could take the cells from
the surrounding wound site and instruct them to do different types of
processes to aid the healing process. So that in the end, you're left
with the native tissue again and it´s a subtle paradigm shift, but what it
gets us thinking about is how would you want to instruct cells, what type of
signals would you want to provide to them. Would it be in the form of
mechanical ques, structural ques, chemical ques and how do you layer them
together in order to obtain some sort of desired biological output? So fortunately
or unfortunately, the biology of a cell is
extraordinarily complex. And so what you see is a cell that will
have the same genome can turn into many different cell types, if you're talking
about stem cells
differentiating into mature cells. What that also means is that these
transcription factors can be used for many different things. So transcription
factors that could be
upregulated in development can also be used when they're upregulated to prevent
cancers from that are responsible for some cancers being harder to treat and
it's all about the context in which these transcription factors are presented,
what sequence they are presented in. What other features are being activated
in the cell at the same time and that's why a lot of these studies are so
complex and time-consuming, but have such a big payoff. because if you could
imagine unlocking the
code of how you would sequentially express a series of transcription factors or
a series of signals to drive particular patterns of transcription
factor activation, you could unlock the ability to
get cells to do what you want. And that would give us the master code to
cure cancer, to regenerate whole limbs, to really address these things that we
have no ability to deal with today, but that you would hope a decade from now or a
generation from now or a century from now, we absolutely will be
doing on a regular basis. And it's the hard work right now
understanding how all these different pathways are interrelated,
how some things are up regulated and down regulated in disease and
development and normal life that'll give us the cues
to understand how do we do that in an engineering context where you want
to show up, provide the right signals. Drive the particular response. Measure that
response and
then move from there. [MUSIC]