Plenary Talk: "Biomimetic Structures for Regenerative Medicine"

Due to shifting demographics, one of the grand challenges for science in this century is to create strategies to regenerate parts of the human body in order to achieve longer “healthspans”. Ideally, designed bioactive materials could act as extracellular matrices with finite half-life that traffic signals in dynamic fashion. This in fact would mimic the function of natural matrices as tissues develop or repair after injury, and requires molecular design of soft materials to directly activate signaling pathways. An important feature of the ideal biomaterials is the nature of internal dynamics across scales, thus imitating the non-static nature of living matter. This lecture will describe a broad platform of supramolecular biomaterials built with a toolbox self-assembling peptide amphiphiles, glycans, and nucleic acids that has been validated by pre-clinical models of neural and musculoskeletal regeneration. These systems can be crafted as highly effective growth factor mimics with longer half lives than proteins, and the tunable dynamics of their non-covalently bonded molecules can have a profound effect on biological efficacy. The lecture will also describe systems in which biological signals can be switched on and off through external cues, and others in which reversible self-assembly of superstructures modulates the phenotype of brain cells.