Conference: Gordon Research Conferences: Biomaterials & and Tissue Engineering, Holderness, New Hampshire, USA.
Conference Highlight: The conference brought together a group of highly talented researchers in Biomaterials. The intimate setting fostered informal discussions around the cutting edge work in the field.
Conference Article: Gordon Research Conferences (GRC) are a unique family of symposiums that serve as a forum for international researchers to come together and discuss cutting edge research in the biological, chemical, and physical sciences, and technologies that relate. The 2017 GRC on Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering was designed to pull together leading clinicians, scientists and engineers in discussion of the use of material-related strategies in solutions for disease remediation and tissue repair. The 2017 conference theme was "Building Novel Molecular Designs and Basic Biological Discoveries into Successful Medical Technologies".
In this the area of biomaterials, researchers are consistently working to couple the cutting edge of healthcare with the chemistry behind material technologies. At the conference, there was an emphasis on this notion, and presenters focused on displaying unpublished data of cutting edge technologies. Overall, it seems that there is an ongoing emphasis on the use of materials to modulate and interact with the human biological system, whereas in the past, there was a notion that biomaterial design should focus on ensuring that the materials were inert upon implantation. Forward movement of designing materials to be instructive and responsive to the cell microenvironment has begun to expand the possibilities with both synthetic and naturally derived materials. As an example, a few talks at this meeting discussed materials with linkages that contain a peptide sequence that can be degraded by a particular enzyme. This can allow for the release of a drug carrier payload in a specific microenvironment where an enzyme is present for controlled release. This focus of research will significantly expand the opportunities for materials in medicine in the future.