Current Opinion in Biomedical Engineering最新文献

Additive manufacturing technologies, especially affordable 3D printers and bioprinters, emerge as sustainability promotion resources, thanks to the possibility of processing green and circular biomaterials from industrial waste, creating value with them. Among industries benefiting from these possibilities, healthcare sector, which takes advantage from the personalization degree of biomedical devices and products achievable through 3D (bio)printing, stands out as socially impactful. Indeed, biomedical devices manufactured with green and circular biomaterials using accessible resources can contribute to achieving equitable and eco-efficient solutions, while generating economic growth and decent work. This is of special relevance for low and middle-income settings, which may benefit from point-of-care production of medical technologies for solving challenging supply chain issues, directly manufacturing open-source solutions from the cloud and employing do-it-yourself materials. In order to generate debate on how to promote the impacts in this area, the current study summarizes research and innovation trends and discusses existing capabilities and challenges. Opinions of authors are presented and supported by an important set of publications and projects focused on healthcare equity and sustainability.

As life expectancy increases and health crises arise, our demand for medical materials is higher than ever. There has been, nevertheless, a concomitant increase in the reliance on traditional fabrication and disposal methods, which are environmentally harmful and energy intensive. Therefore, technologies need adaptations to ensure a more sustainable future for medicine. Such technological improvements could be designed by taking inspiration from nature, where the concept of “waste” is virtually non-existent. These nature-inspired solutions can be engineered into the lifecycle of medical materials at different points, from raw materials and fabrication to application and recycling. To achieve this, we present four technological developments as promising enablers – surface patterning, additive manufacturing, microfluidics, and synthetic biology. For each enabler, we discuss how sustainable solutions can be designed based on current understanding of, and ongoing research on, natural systems or concepts, including shark skin, decentralised manufacturing, process intensification, and synthetic biology.

The advent of computer-aided concepts and cognitive algorithms, along with fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic thoughts, supported the idea of ‘making computers think like people’ (Lotfi A. Zadeh, IEEE Spectrum, 21 (26–32), 1984). Such a school of thought enabled the sophistication of mission-oriented development of biomaterials and biosystems with the aid of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI). Since polysaccharides (PSA) are medically safe and rely on stimuli-responsiveness, we herein highlight the importance of using AI-based algorithms in PSA-based biomedical engineering. Since manufacturing PSA-based biomaterials by AI experiences a very early stage of maturity, pattern recognition and behavior visualization by ‘Machine Learning’ (ML) models are not stressed herein. Nevertheless, exceptional chemical features of PSA such as surface modification and high adaptability facilitate ML-aided innovations. PSA-based biomaterials reveal diverse biomedical properties; therefore, summarizing, sorting, and recalling the best scenarios and optimization of the performance features of PSA still seems far from reach. We just highlight herein PSA-based biomedical engineering by the aid of AI to establish an agenda for the future. Herein, the outlook of targeted drug delivery vehicles, skin tissue engineering templates, wound healing systems, cancer treatment platforms, biosensors, personalized detection complexes, and particularly AI-aided bioprinting are generally covered.

Wound healing is a complex process that requires an appropriate environment to support healing. Wound dressings play a crucial role in wound management by protecting the wound and promoting healing. Recent advancements in wound dressing technology include the development of bio-absorbable electrospun dressings incorporating essential oils, which have shown promise in enhancing wound healing potential. However, there is still a need for sustainable wound dressing technology that is effective, safe, and environmentally friendly. This review addresses this need by emphasizing the potential of bio-absorbable electrospun wound dressings incorporating essential oils and advocating for a paradigm shift toward sustainable crop-origin materials and the elimination of toxic solvents in wound dressing fabrication.

Zebrafish (Danio rerio) larvae are emerging as high-throughput, chemical screening assays for investigating congenital cardiomyopathies. Despite distinct anatomical and genomic differences with humans, zebrafish share a conserved regulatory network of transcription factors modulating heart development with mammals. Consequently, external embryonic fertilization and optical transparency in conjunction with fluorescent reporters localizing endogenous proteins provide an ideal platform for studying molecular mechanisms underlying complex human heart development. In this regard, recent advances in light sheet microscopy (LSM) have enabled non-invasive, in vivo reconstruction of dynamic cardiac biomarkers during early stages of embryonic zebrafish heart development. In this review, we discuss the development of cardiovascular disease progression pipelines using zebrafish and LSM to identify genetic and molecular drivers of human cardiac disease.

Targeted protein degradation (TPD) is an emerging therapeutic approach that has attracted significant interest. The traditional TPD degraders rely on small molecules that can only target proteins of interest (POI) with known small-molecule binders or appropriate binding pockets. Recently, several genetic-encoded TPD (GE-TPD) strategies have been developed in which the degrader molecules are expressed in cells based on genetic information. GE-TPD discovers POI binders through techniques such as yeast and phage display and expands the E3 ligase toolbox through genetic encoding. In this review, we assess the progress of GE-TPD technologies in recent years and highlight innovative technologies that have the potential to advance the development of GE-TPD.

The need for new genome manipulation tools is leading the way for the continued discovery of novel clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats— CRISPR associated sequences (CRISPR-Cas) systems. Researchers have been analyzing the genomes of prokaryotes and more recently metagenomic sequencing data to find novel and diverse CRISPR-Cas systems and their associated genome editing effectors. In this review, we provide an overview of in silico, in vitro, and in vivo analyses performed to characterize key elements of CRISPR-Cas systems, encompassing the CRISPR array, Cas proteins, guide ribonucleic acid (RNAs), and protospacer-adjacent motif (PAM) which defines targeting. We also highlight subsequent in vitro and in vivo assays employed to validate CRISPR function and Cas effector activity in the context of genome editing in various cellular contexts.

Additive manufacturing, often known as three-dimensional (3D) printing, is driving significant progress in a diverse range of fields, such as engineering, manufacturing, food, and medicine. Realistic tissue models and organ transplantation can provide necessary innovative opportunities to tackle countless medical and health care obstacles. These can be achieved by incorporation of 3D printing into tissue engineering, using live cells encapsulated in natural or synthetic biomaterials. This evolution of 3D bioprinting has been the focus of our article. Here, we methodically discussed the current stance, history, techniques, materials, and taxonomy of 3D bioprinting along with the challenges encountered.