BioE Seminar Series

Title: Building injectable microporosity through the assembly of particle building blocks

Abstract:

Injectable materials that can conform to the shape of a desired space are used in a variety of fields including medicine. The ability to fill a tissue defect with an injectable material can be used for example to deliver drugs, augment tissue volume, or promote repair of an injury. This talk will explore the development of injectable materials that are based on assembled particle building blocks, for tissue repair. We find that using microparticle building blocks to build the scaffold generates a porous network by the space left behind between adjacent building blocks. Due to the injecability of this microporous material we have explored its wide applicability to tissue repair applicatins ranging from skin to brain wounds. We find that in the skin our particle scaffold promotes wound closure and granulation tissue thickess more than widely used polymeric crosslinked hydrogels. In both the brain and the skin our particle scaffolds result in reduced inflammation.
A second part of the talk will focus on nanoparticles for growth factor delivery based on protein nanocapsules. These nanocapsues are synthesized through insitu radical polymerization directly on the protein surface generating a polymeric skin on the protein surface. The polymeric skin is crosslinked with protease degradable peptides, which control growth factor release by proteases contained in the wound sites.