Materials
Bacteria, fungi and viruses that no longer respond to antibiotics – as well as other medicines and sanitisation techniques – are estimated to become the leading global cause of death by 2050. With 2019 University of Michigan research showing that one- fifth of objects in patients’ rooms have antimicrobial- resistant superbugs on them, medical world practitioners are scrambling to ensure that equipment essential to life-saving care, everything from gloves, bandages and the fabrics on surgeons gowns, doesn’t end up becoming a factor in causing health problems in themselves.
These practical needs are echoed by institutional support. In 2015, to give one example, the United Nations conjured the phrase ‘Grand Challenges’ referring to the pressing need to solve complex, global problems that would likely need new research and grassroots ideas to be surmounted. The body’s pronouncement sparked a slew of grants, with hubs like UCL’s Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering winning financing in order to research the natural world – in an interdisciplinary manner, often looking at the structures of natural systems, or discrete parts, in order to better understand them and inspire synthetic applications – and apply them to, firstly, engineering and manufacturing challenges and latterly sustainability, urban management as well as health and well-being. “We’re at this moment where we now have the computational science and machine learning to design new materials to meet big challenges,” explains Professor Marc-Olivier Coppens, vice dean at the centre “But we’re looking at how nature, or part of nature, might resolve an issue or challenge and taking facets of that and applying it to our context.”
Musseling in to support
There are few places that better exemplify this blend of medical need and scientific support than in Spain. Here, researchers from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2) have built on decades of research to synthetically mimic the structure of the proteins in mussel secretions. Along the way, they’ve created a coating that can be applied to commonly used sanitary equipment in clinical settings, such as surgical masks and commercial plasters. For Dr Salvio Suárez-Garcia, a senior postdoctoral researcher at ICN2, these coatings have shown super-effective antimicrobial properties in tests. That’s doubly true in humid environments – such as the ones found in hospitals. “The results [of the mussel- derived coatings] were impressive for pathogens that are very hard to kill,” Suárez-Garcia says of bacteria and fungi like E. coli, P. aeruginosa or C. albicans. “Now we are expanding where we think we might
Medical Device Developments /
www.nsmedicaldevices.com
apply this thinking, taking the same principle and using it for membranes you can attach to a wound, for skin regeneration because our material can work by targeting and killing harmful bacteria but not healthy cells.” Water-resistant, clinically effective and with a great claim to sustainability – the molecules used in the production process are taken from the waste of wine production – it is unsurprising that Suárez-Garcia’s invention is enjoying both commercial and clinical interest. The Spain-based researcher explains that this will be as critical public grants are limited so using this research to look at targeting blastoma, brain tumours, other cancers as well as chronic wounds and ulcers – “going deeper into antimicrobial activity and then making real products for the market” – will need the commercial partnership, which is forthcoming. It presumably helps that mussels have already proved useful far beyond the hospital ward. “When the composition of mussels was first analysed and a use was found for the structure, it was initially used as an anti-corrosive,” Suárez- Garcia says – not, he adds, in hospital settings, but rather in battling rust during steel production. It’s such leaps between industries and disciplines of research, a cross-pollination, that excites UCL’s Coppens. He’s optimistic that such sector-breaking connections, as well as collaborations between physicists, chemists, engineers and biologists in bio- inspired research, can help humanity find solutions to some big medical ticket problems. When we met, on a hot early-summer day in central London, Coppens explains how research designed to make industrial chemical production more sustainable – in a process itself part inspired by kidney filtration – was then repurposed for antimicrobial resistance work. “It’s synergistic,” Coppens says. “You can see how research in clean chemical production can be used for other real-world applications.” Indeed, it’s not just mussels inspiring anti-microbial work, but
The Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology.
$40.1bn
The current value of the global bio-inspired
materials market.
Fact.MR
35%
The percentage of revenue generated in 2022 by the wound-healing segment of the bio-inspired medical market.
Precedence Research 107
Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150
