The Molecular Toolbox: Dendrimer Decorated Biomaterials for Musculoskeletal Regeneration

• Autores: Ryan James Seelbach
• Directores de la Tesis: Álvaro Mata Chavarría (dir. tes.), Amílcar Labarta (dir. tes.), David Eglin (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universitat de Barcelona ( España ) en 2015
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Carlos Eduardo Semino Margrett (presid.), Jordi Alcaraz (secret.), Helena Azevedo (voc.)
• Materias:
  • Ciencias de la vida
    • Biofísica
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: Dipòsit Digital de la UB
• Resumen

  • Regenerative medicine takes multifaceted approaches towards healing complex injury and restoring normal tissue function by combining biomaterials with cells and drugs. Recently, naturally occurring polymers found in the human body have inspired biomaterials that play active roles in the regenerative process. One polymer, hyaluronic acid, has ubiquitous roles in the human body, and is an important component to tissue development and healing. These materials are proving to be more capable to the complex tasks of guiding tissue regeneration; however, the search continues for laboratory inspired solutions to help guide the regeneration process. We need to be able to control the presentation of bioactive agents in the microenvironment which is the level at which cells operate. Some researchers have attempted to augment the scaffold biochemistry by controlling the spatial presentation of bioactive molecules by playing with clustering peptide sequences, but they do not have a high control over the nanoscale aspect. For the problem of controlling the molecular architecture of the biomaterial microenvironment, nanotechnology has a solution. Dendrimers are synthetic branched macromolecules which are symmetric, monodisperse, and globular in shape. Most importantly however, is that their inherent structure maintains strict presentation of terminal groups. Up to this point, never before have dendrimers been covalently mixed with biomaterials to provide strict control over the presentation of biomolecules in the scaffold microenvironment. This novel technology poses a new biomaterials niche for guiding bone regeneration. The motivation of the thesis is to contribute to the development of intelligent biomaterial platforms by combining peptide epitope binding dendrimers with a thermoreversible biomaterial platform based on hyaluronic acid in the hope to advance bone regeneration.