Abstract

Hip implants, synthetic heart valves, and drug eluting wafers for the brain. What do these all have in common? Each one is a biomaterial that is designed to interact with a biological system. Physicians often seek to cure ailments or improve a patient’s quality of life by employing biomaterials. Classically, the process of biomedical device innovation is driven by clinical demand. Yet, it is here that the development of new biomaterials diverges. The first path to a new biomaterial includes clearly defining a medical need and then rationally designing a material based on the need. This has resulted in the development of common products such as contact lenses and surgical sutures. The second path involves developing unique materials that often do not have clearly defined medical applications or have failed in their original application. From this latter path, we can explore the potential of the new material in irrational applications. For example, modern contact lenses were inspired by a physician who observed that WWII aviators suffered no long-term eye damage from embedded plastic windshield fragments. As another example, the field of modern tissue engineering stemmed from one physician taking left over biodegradable surgical suture off the operating room floor post-surgery, fraying the threads, and growing cells on this 3D scaffold. This talk will cover the creation of biomaterials throughout the speaker’s career that were rationally designed for a specific medical application and then repurposed for a completely different, sometimes irrational, application.