Materials that can be used as scaffolds for organ-building and tissue engineering.

• Technical Achievement: Enable printable biomimetic hydrogels with tunable mechanical properties and enable long-term primary cell growth and proliferation.
• Technical Achievement: Engineer soft, conductive (and/or stimulatory) biocompatible materials for repair or replacement of neural damage.
• Technical Achievement: Engineer new and existing extracellular matrix proteins as scaffolds that can be functionalized into new biomaterials with expanded and tailored properties.
• Technical Achievement: Engineer adhesives that bond to unsmooth and wet biological surfaces for tissue repair.
• Technical Achievement: Engineer protein bio-wires with enhanced conductivity to enable ‘flexible electronics’.¹Torculas, M., Medina, J., Xue, W., & Hu, X. (2016). Protein-based bioelectronics. ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering, 2(8), 1211-1223. View Publication
• Technical Achievement: Engineer proteins for 3D-printing of tissue scaffolds with tunable mechanical properties and controlled biological functions.
• Technical Achievement: Engineer biomaterials endowed with tunable elasticity and strength to meet the demands dynamic tissues.
• Technical Achievement: Engineer coatings for brain implants that prevent scarring of surrounding tissue and prolong implant lifetime.

Smart biologics with programmable functions.

• Technical Achievement: Customize pharmacodynamic properties, such as tuned stability of protein or peptide-based transcription, for different biologics to overcome the challenge of short half-lives.
• Technical Achievement: Target delivery and localization, and enable specificity, of biologics to tissue or cells of interest.²Wang, S-T., Gray, M.A., Xuan, S., Lin, Y., Byrnes, J., Nguyen, A.I., Todorova, N., Stevens, M.M., Bertozzi, C.R., Zuckermann, R.N., & Gang, O. (2020). DNA origami protection and molecular interfacing through engineered sequence-defined peptoids. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 117(12), 6339-6348. View Publication
• Technical Achievement: Engineer responsive biologics that sense environmental or metabolic cues to govern activity (e.g., smart insulin that can sense and respond to changes in blood sugar).
• Technical Achievement: Engineer biomolecules and cellular biologics to reduce immunogenicity.
• Technical Achievement: Engineer biologics endowed with ability to encode multiple new functions.

Footnotes

1. Torculas, M., Medina, J., Xue, W., & Hu, X. (2016). Protein-based bioelectronics. ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering, 2(8), 1211-1223. https://doi.org/10.1021/acsbiomaterials.6b00119
2. Wang, S-T., Gray, M.A., Xuan, S., Lin, Y., Byrnes, J., Nguyen, A.I., Todorova, N., Stevens, M.M., Bertozzi, C.R., Zuckermann, R.N., & Gang, O. (2020). DNA origami protection and molecular interfacing through engineered sequence-defined peptoids. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 117(12), 6339-6348. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1919749117