Chemical Engineering in Bioengineering and Bionanotechnology
Significant developments in advanced biomedical systems and devices facilitate the creation of systems that do not simply respond to a biological input in a specific, controlled manner but do so at the desired site of action, critical to its overall therapeutic effect.
Essentially this involves a mimicking of the natural response of the body/organs/tissues/cells to varying concentration levels of target biomolecules. Intelligent biomaterials and devices address and achieve these desired therapeutic effects and with varying levels of success.
These biomimetic structures based on proteins, DNA, RNA, man-made building blocks (i.e., synthetic polymers and unnatural amino acids), or combinations of these have been demonstrated to mimic biological systems and processes. We have introduced groundbreaking efforts that span a variety of biomimetic systems, and we expect that this work and the solid foundation it has provided will lead to methods and materials that will revolutionize medicine. We discuss the tailoring of therapeutics based on an individuals genetic predisposition toward disease (i.e., individualized therapeutics). Of continued importance to biomimetic developments is the rational design of the constituent chemistry and subsequent linking of various synthetic and biological counterparts. If certain strategies to produce or obtain biological structures are insurmountable and/or inefficient, researchers have used a number ingeniously crafted methods based on fundamental biology to obtain novel biological or hybrid structures. However, the challenge lies in building precise structural alignment as well as tunable or switchable functionality into materials as well as optimizing delivery profiles and release constraints. Biomimetic systems can be put to many uses: to investigate diseased cells and tissues; to target such locations with therapeutic formulations; or just to study the internal organization of the cell. Biomimetic systems and devices are emerging in various clinical applications such as autoimmunity, imaging, targeted therapeutic options for cancer, and infectious disease. The development of micro- and nanoscale systems has promised significantly improved treatment regimens that were previously not possible. Within these efforts, major emphasis has been focused toward engineering the architectural design of materials at the molecular level, and biomimetic processes are prime candidates for the creation of enhanced systems at the small scale with tremendous promise to profoundly impact medicine and treatment options for disease.