New Jersey Center for Biomaterials

One of RESBIO's key research goals is to contribute to a better understanding of cellular interactions with tissue scaffolds.

Step 1: Engineered Cells express GFP-labeled markers to allow the direct imaging of key cellular responses when grown on tissue scaffolds in vitro.

Example: Saos-2 cells expressing GFP-fusions with actin, actinin, paxillin, and RhoA are visualized with multi-photon laser scanning microscopy to show important details of the cellular interaction with the underlying substratum.

Step 2: Changes in scaffold architecture can now be explored in detail.

Example: Exploration of cell ular adhesion on electrospun po lymer fibers as a function of the fiber diameter. Saos-2/pGFP-actin cells reveal that if the fiber diameter is relatively large (left), the cell's actin stress fibers will predominantly align with the polymer fibers, while at small fiber diameters (right), the cell will regard the fiber scaffold essentially as a "patterned surface" and the actin stress fibers do not align with the polymer fibers.

One of RESBIO's key technology goals is to develop a computational approach to accelerate biomaterials discovery.

Step 1: Rapid parallel synthesis of polymer libraries and the development of rapid screening assays to explore the property profiles of biomaterials.


Parallel Synthesis Robot	Rapid Screening Assays	Structure-property correlations

Step 2: Development computational tools for rapid screening of potential candidates forr novel poymeric biomaterials.

Using state-of-the-art computational approaches including molecular dynamic simulations combined with docking and datamining, new polymeric biomaterials are developed. This prescreening approach of large polymer libraries helps in development of interesting “lead” biomaterials as drug delivery systems, implants etc, reducing the time and cost efforts as part of rational design process.