Monday September 9
Summary plenary session
- Jens Thies from DSM’s presentation was a thought provoking lecture highlighting the struggle between regulations and research. He emphasized putting the patients’ needs and safety at the core of all new research in the medical area. He highlighted the dilemma of exploding health care costs balanced against the care for patients, innovation and choices in society. This revealed the need for collaborative approaches across various disciplines in order to provide medical solutions that can have an impact.
- Anne Ritter from Evonik was focusing on the personalization of medicine and the resulting needs for materials; her examples included additive manufacturing with all the different varieties currently being developed and the benefits of these technologies for patients. These would be found in printed medicine that could incorporate all ingredients of one day in one pill or easier to swallow pills. Also tissue engineering and implants will benefit from these activities for personalization. Anne also showed the medical biomaterials required a long term research vision that has to be sustainably maintained and is global.
Summary parallel sessions:
Polymers for personal care
- Jerome Vachon from SABIC gave an interesting presentation on extractables and leachables coming from several plastic materials used in drug packaging. He showed how sterilization techniques affect these compounds, but also highlighted several improvement options.
- Teun Sweere from Culgi impressed the audience with his modeling efforts that could predict several important polymer characteristics such as barrier properties based on input from small molecule analogues.
- Nadia Grossiard from SABIC went in depth on liquid crystalline polymers that form structures that can be made responsive to certain liquids and to mechanical stresses with potential applications in sensors.
- Prof. Enrico Dalcanale from University of Parma highlighted strategies to incorporate early damage detection into complex composite structures making the effect of fatigue visible in time before actual failure occurs. As such this can add to the overall safety when used in airplanes and cars.
- Maarten Smulders from Wageningen University showed the audience a successful approach in coating particles to prevent proteins from adhering to them while making them very selectively interact with one specific target molecule of choice. An interesting result that could be used in sensor applications.
- John Krist from SABIC covered the various techniques that exist to commercially make foam structures and went in depth on how specific structures make materials suitable or not for each of these techniques.
Tuesday September 10
Summary parallel sessions:
Biobased and Biodegradable polymers
- Miguel Oliveira from University of Minho provided a thorough overview of the potential of natural based polymers as advanced biomaterials to develop new therapies for skeletal regeneration, spanning from meniscal to osteochondral and intervertebral disc applications. A future outlook where biomaterials enhanced with the capacity to be monitored through clinical imaging technologies (e.g. MRI) is given. This will be important to further understand and monitor how tissue regeneration develops in time.
Polymers for drug delivery
- Christine Jerome from Liege University provided an overview of the potential of phosphoesters for drug delivery applications, in particular for the delivery of proteins. This is possible thanks to the pentavalency of the phosphorus atom, which offers a large diversity of structures and as a consequence a wide range of properties for these materials.
- Yashoda Chandorkar from RWTH Aachen University has shown in a very intuitively explained lecture the complex communication between dynamic biomaterial substrates and cells. She has developed patterned hydrogels where groves could be light-activated to change their height, as if they were beating. This resulted in a control in cell migration, which was studied in more details looking at cell molecular clutches.
- Andreas Heise from RCSI Ireland provided a very neat approach combining gene delivery approaches with targeted tissue regeneration or antimicrobial activity. This was possible through the synthesis and characterization of a versatile polymer platform based on polypeptides, which can be processed also for bioprinting applications.
Wednesday September 11
Summary parallel sessions:
Biobased and Biodegradable polymers
The Wednesday morning session on biobased and biodegradable polymers highlighted the broadness of the activities in the biobased materials field. Lectures were given on how to and why make durable high performance bio(based) composites from for example flax fibers by Prof. Aart van Vuure from KU Leuven, on the importance of the evaluation of the actual impact of the use of biobased materials as the use of biobased materials is not per se better from a life-cycle point of view explained by Dr. Yvonne van der Meer, Maastricht University/AMIBM, and on the development of novel copolymers for biomedical applications by Vahid Ansari, Maastricht University/MERLN. The second part of the morning session continued to display the broad nature of the activities in the field by an all Maastricht University session: Professor Lorenzo Moroni from Maastricht University highlighted the endeavors in the field of additive manufacturing for regenerative medicine where he highlighted the complexity of the interaction between the fields of material science and biology where the last two speakers elaborated on the development of recyclable fiber-reinforced composites by Gijs de Kort, Maastricht University/AMIBM and the development of novel functional biopolymers using green chemistry by Manta Roy, Maastricht University//AMIBM.
Closure of the conference by Prof Robert H. Grubbs, California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
Nobel Laureate Robert Grubbs lecture was inspiring and built on a theme introduced at the start of the conference; it is better to invest in the problem to be solved rather than focusing on ones own technology or potential solution. This was neatly illustrated by dealing with health care needs with accommodating intraocular lens and kidney stones unmet needs both of which included polymer technologies beyond metathesis. Furthermore he emphasized the need for a collaborative research endeavour and the importance of access to clinicians and commercial expertise in order to bring technology to fruition. Finally he acknowledged that strong funding for start ups that exists in investment community in California is needed, and the knowledge of good infrastructure that fosters innovative concepts is necessary. It was a great presentation and closure thanks to Prof. Robert H. Grubbs!