Title:

Bio-inspired Materials for Regenerative Medicine and Sensing

Speaker:

Prof. Molly M. Stevens

Affiliation:

Imperial College, London

When:

Wednesday, November 10, 2010 at 4:00:00 PM   Add to Calendar

Where:

Van Leer Building, Room Auditorium

Host:

Leslie Baylor
leslie.baylor@mse.gatech.edu

Abstract

This talk will provide an overview of our recent developments in bio-inspired nanomaterials for tissue regeneration and sensing. Bio-responsive nanomaterials are of growing importance with potential applications including drug delivery, diagnostics and tissue engineering. Our recent simple conceptually novel approaches to real-time monitoring of protease, lipase and kinase enzyme action using modular peptide functionalized NPs will be presented.[1-3]

The highly interdisciplinary field of Tissue Engineering (TE) can also benefi t from advances in the design of bio-responsive nanomaterials. TE involves the development of artifi cial scaffold structures on which new cells are encouraged to grow. The ability to control topography and chemistry at the nanoscale offers exciting possibilities for stimulating growth of new tissue through the development of novel nanostructured scaffolds that mimic the nanostructure of the tissues in the body.[4-7] Recent developments in this context will be discussed. References.

Biography

Professor Molly Stevens is Research Director for Biomedical Material Sciences in the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London. She joined Imperial in 2004 from Postdoctoral training with Professor Robert Langer at MIT. She graduated from Bath University with a first class honours degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences and was awarded a PhD in biophysical investigations from the University of Nottingham (2000). Amongst many awards, in 2009 she was awarded the Jean Leray Award from the European Society for Biomaterials. She has been recognised by Technology Review’s TR100, a compilation of the top innovators worldwide. She has a large, extremely multidisciplinary research group of students and postdocs/fellows developing novel biomaterials for regenerative medicine and biosensing. She is the main founder of RepRegen which was awarded the ACES Amgen European Life Sciences company of the year 2009 and is setting-up a clinical trial for bone regeneration in humans.

Notes

Refreshments will be served.