Professor Aline Miller, Manchester University
Significant effort has been made over the past few decades to develop increasingly complex soft materials, driven by both fundamental curiosity and by urgent unmet clinical needs of an increasingly aging population. Taking inspiration from the many millennia proteins have had to perfect their structure-property-function relationships, self-assembling peptides have emerged as excellent material building blocks for the design of soft matter as they are inherently biocompatible and allow the design of stable, versatile hydrogels for use in a variety of biomedical applications. Here I will discuss our platform technology for the design of hydrogels exploiting the self-assembly of short beta-sheet forming peptides, and emerging themes in understanding and controlling their self-assembly to create unique nanostructures. I will go onto share how we founded and grown a start-up company, Manchester BIOGEL Ltd, to commercialise our material sand exemplify how they are being translated from the lab into the clinic and finding application as supports for tissue regeneration, drug discovery and as vehicles for targeted drug delivery.
Significant effort has been made over the past few decades to develop increasingly complex soft materials, driven by both fundamental curiosity and by urgent unmet clinical needs of an increasingly aging population. Taking inspiration from the many millennia proteins have had to perfect their structure-property-function relationships, self-assembling peptides have emerged as excellent material building blocks for the design of soft matter as they are inherently biocompatible and allow the design of stable, versatile hydrogels for use in a variety of biomedical applications. Here I will discuss our platform technology for the design of hydrogels exploiting the self-assembly of short beta-sheet forming peptides, and emerging themes in understanding and controlling their self-assembly to create unique nanostructures. I will go onto share how we founded and grown a start-up company, Manchester BIOGEL Ltd, to commercialise our material sand exemplify how they are being translated from the lab into the clinic and finding application as supports for tissue regeneration, drug discovery and as vehicles for targeted drug delivery.
