WW-Kolloquium: Dr. Antonia Ressler, From regeneration to protection: Biomimetic materials in bone repair, cancer therapy, and infection control

Dr. Antonia Ressler
Materials Science and Environmental Engineering, Tampere University of Technology, Finland

From regeneration to protection: Biomimetic materials in bone repair, cancer therapy, and infection control

At least half of population lacks access to essential health services, creating an urgent need for innovative and affordable medical solutions. There is pressing need to address major challenges related to the bone diseases. The incidence of bone fractures is increasing globally and bone grafting now stands as the second most prevalent tissue transplantation. In addition to increased number of bone fractures/defects, bone cancer is one of the cancers with the lowest long-term survival rate. Further, bacterial resistance is a persistent global issue driven by the uncontrolled use of antibiotics. It seems that the long feared postantibiotic era is here, urging new methods to fight infections. Most scaffolds developed for bone regeneration lack anticancer and antibacterial functionality, highlighting the urgent need for multifunctional scaffold designs.
The possible solution is to treat patients with biomimetic scaffolds based on calcium phosphates multi-substituted with different trace elements to obtain a multifunctional scaffold for bone regeneration with antibacterial and anticancer properties. The impact of the selected trace elements, different scaffold compositions, and designs was evaluated to gain deep insights into physicochemical properties as well as osteogenic potential using human stem cells. The effect of trace elements was investigated, and selective anticancer properties were determined when selenium was used as a substitution element. Furthermore, the antibacterial effect against multidrug-resistant bacteria from clinical isolates was investigated for a wide selection of elements, confirming silver as the gold standard.