Question: What is the most interesting bio-medical material that you have founds throughout your job?

Jess Smith answered on 11 Mar 2014:

I don’t really research new biomaterials, I am working at making one better, so I haven’t found one as such. I have done a lot of reading, and gone to a lot of talks on all sorts of different bio-medical materials though, so I will tell you about one of those.

There are so many exciting technologies and materials being developed in bio-medical materials, I’m not sure I can pick a most interesting! The best thing about medical materials, is that you can make a very small change to a material which has a big effect on how it interacts with the body. For example, my colleague makes ‘collagen scaffolds’. Collagen is a molecule that is found in the body, it is the building blocks of our hard tissue (like bones and cartilage) and soft tissue (like muscles and skin). In nature the collagen scaffold is made by special cells, and then other cells live and grow on it, making it into tissue as we know it. If we make a scaffold in the lab, and give it the right environment (warmth and nutrients) then we can make new cells grow as well. The idea behind this is that you could eventually make an artificial organ by putting cells from the patient onto a scaffold that you have made in the lab. We are a long way off! What is very interesting is that changing the properties of the collagen scaffold dramatically changes how happy the cells are to start multiplying on the scaffold surface. For example if we make the scaffold too stiff and rigid, but leave everything else the same, then the cells die. If the holes in the scaffold are not exactly the right size then the cells may also die. We don’t always understand why they can’t survive when we change the materials properties, but it raises some very interesting new questions to answer.