Foresight Fellowship in Manufacturing: "High-throughput functionalization of biomaterials for personalized healthcare"

Both "Advanced and Functional Materials" and "Biotechnology" have been identified as pervasive technologies for future manufacturing activities in the UK. This Fellowship will join these two areas by developing chemical and biological technologies to create advanced functionalized biomaterials, taking advantage of the Fellow's cross-disciplinary expertise at the chemistry/biology interface. Working with manufacturers of biomaterials for healthcare and personal care, hybrid biomaterials will be produced that are able to heal and diagnose.

An aging population needs cheaper biomedical materials with improved performance, but robust chemical and biotechnological processes for biomaterial functionalization are needed to create these materials. High-throughput modular methodologies are proposed for the modification of nanostructured biomaterials that will allow manufacturers to create tailored high-quality products for different markets, methodology that is able to respond quickly to the needs of customers (e.g. patients). These methodologies will draw on the UK's strengths in biotechnology to achieve a step change in cost reduction and an increase in performance; even a small reduction in costs to the NHS would bring significant benefits to the UK.

The Fellowship will address this problem through work in three key theme areas: (1) developing simple, cheap and easy-to-access methodologies for adding reactive nanoparticles to biomaterials; (2) using synthetic biology and biotechnology to functionalise biomaterials; (3) using synthetic chemistry to produce value-added biomaterials. Each theme area has been identified as an exciting and highly interdisciplinary field that is ripe for exploitation, but where poor communication between experts in different fields is hampering progress. For example, there is insufficient involvement of industrial biotechnologists, synthetic chemists and supramolecular chemists in biomaterials manufacture despite clear synergies in expertise and the importance of this area to UK manufacturing.

This Fellowship will build networks between biomaterials academics and biomaterials manufacturers, with partnerships backed up through meetings, researcher exchanges and follow-on funding. The Fellow will stimulate new innovative approaches to collaborative research by interacting with leading international researchers in Europe, the US and Australia/New Zealand who have complementary expertise to that of the applicant. The applicant will engage with leading UK manufacturers and international academic researchers, both through personal meetings and by helping to organise industry-academia meetings and developing new funded collaborations.

At the end of this Fellowship, new easy-to-use chemical and biochemical methodologies will have been developed that will have applicability across academic and non-academic biomaterials research, producing new opportunities for UK manufacturing.

Who will benefit and how will they benefit:

Academic researchers will benefit as described previously, and this impact will be in the short to medium term as the collaborative research that forms part of this application bears fruit. These impacts will be shared through the usual channels, including presentations and meetings/conferences and [publications in high impact journals.

Manufacturers in the areas of biomaterials, personal care products and biomedical devices will directly benefit from this Fellowship in several different ways. In the short term, the meeting and contacts proposed in the Fellowship will bring manufacturers together with academics, allowing the problems faced by manufacturers to be recognised and then addressed by academics. For example, our ongoing work with ConvaTec has highlighted the need for easy-to-use and high yielding chemistry/biochemistry technology that will add value to healthcare products. Also in the short term the collaborative academic-industrial research described in the proposal may lead to new products but also valuable intellectual property for industrial partners. In the medium to long term this will increase the UK's competitiveness in the manufacture of biomaterials, as methodologies are developed that can be applied across several materials manufacturing industries. These methodologies will add value to low cost precursors and allow products to be produced that are more responsive to the needs of consumers (in this case healthcare professionals and patients). The impacts from the industrial collaborations will be disseminated both by publication, but particularly through patent protection.

The nation's health will benefit in the longer term as cheaper biomedical materials with improved performance become available. Our high-throughput methodologies will draw on the UK's strengths in biotechnology to achieve a reduction in cost and increase in performance, where even a small reduction in treatment costs would bring significant benefits to the NHS, particularly as the population ages. The public will also be engaged in these impacts, through updates in the media and the applicant's webpage as relevant, ensuring the wider community understand the public good that arises through these investments of public funds.

Researchers involved in the project, such as the applicant and his PhD students, will gain new technical and scientific skills in some of the latest and most exciting areas of scientific research, stimulating the formation of new ideas and development of their research careers either inside the UK or internationally.