Modulation of Macrophage Response by Nitric Oxide delivery from Nanoclay based Hydrogels for Skin Tissue Regeneration

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Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine (TERM) are emerging fields focused on the development of alternative therapies for tissue repair. These highly multidisciplinary fields combining material science, engineering, chemistry, stem cell biology, pharmacy, and medicine are based on integrative approaches using biomaterials, cells, drugs, and growth factors to overcome the limitations that exist in current and traditional clinical methods. Based on a collaborative network established via an MRC-KHIDI UK-Korea 2018 partnering award, we aim to further strengthen and develop our activities between the UK (Medicine, University of Southampton) and South Korea (Chemical Engineering & Materials Science, Yonsei University). The focus is to train, exchange and develop talented researchers and support the researchers to undertake promising research projects designed for skin tissue regeneration harnessing nanomaterial (nanoclay) and biological platforms.
1) Foster multidisciplinary researchers: The current proposal represents an exciting opportunity to access unique skills, technologies, research materials and facilities at each partner university through a proposed 10 months of researcher exchange. The exchange will allow examination of the hypothesis, NO release from tailored hydrogel nanoclay scaffolds impacts on macrophage re-sponses, to drive immunomodulation and angiogenesis/vasculogenesis to support skin repair. The award will facilitate knowledge exchange, techniques (cell isolation/culture, inorganic synthetic chemistry, chemical analysis, biological analysis) as well as training of both UK and Korean re-searchers in the skills of cross-disciplinary regenerative research. This will broaden and deepen research understanding providing new perspectives and research paradigms for both partners.
2) Enhance a global and multidisciplinary research collaboration: Through an MRC-KHIDI UK-Korea partnering award in 2018, two research groups successfully established a productive research network (generating two published papers). The current Covid-19 pandemic significantly impacted on a successful nascent research collaboration and this MRC-MSIT/NRF UK Korea research mobility award will relaunch this global and multidisciplinary research network between the two research groups. The proposed programme of collaborative research will harness different but complementary expertise/backgrounds to pioneer a drug-delivery system for niche-development for wound repair.
3) Ensure academic impact and collaboration pathway: We aim to publish at least two papers in journals that guarantee permanent unrestricted access (in line with open access initiatives) to ensure dissemination to a wide audience, while enhancing and influencing the current research environment. To enhance our academic, industrial, and translational impacts for a long term, we will actively ex-plore follow-on-funding to harness the potential of developed clay-based hydrogels for tissue regen-eration as well as collaborative research programmes within each group’s grant/fellowship pro-grammes.