Biomaterials

Research

The research activities carried out at the Department of Industrial Engineering by the Biomaterials Unit cover the following areas: peptide synthesis, purification and characterization; investigation of structure-activity relationships in biopolymers; maturation process of pro-proteins; design and synthesis of growth/adhesion factors; cellular adhesion processes in biological tissues; biomaterials surface functionalization and characterization; investigation on osteoblastic cell adhesion by total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy; self-assembling peptide scaffolds; biological heart valves treatment; characterization and treatment of animal pericardium for the production of bioprosthetic devices; mechanical heart valve monitoring; design and development of hybrid membrane for the production of hemocompatible pulsatile chambers (Total Artificial Heart project); Wavelet transform analysis of cutaneous microcirculation. Extended relationships are maintained with Prof. N. Seidah, IRCM, Montreal, Canada; Prof. L. Moroni, Institute for technology-inspired Regenerative Medicine, MERLN, Maastricht University,The Netherlands; Prof. Olivier Gallet, ERRMECe (Equipe de Recherche sur les Relations Matice-Extracellulaire/Cellule), Universitè de Cergy Pontoise, Neuville Sur Oise, France; Prof. Lucy Di Silvio, King’s College of London, London, UK; Prof. A.R. Boccaccini, Institute of Biomaterials, department of Material Science and Engineering, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany; Dr Ion Tcacencu, Center for Oral Biology, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden; prof. Salvador Borros, Laboratori Ciència dels Materials, Universitat Ramon Llull, Barcelona, Spain; prof. Aneta Stefanovska, Department of Physisc, Lancaster University, UK. Several research activities are currently performed in collaboration with the groups belonging to the infrastructure called “Ingegneria Cardiovascolare Strategica – INCAS”, which has been recently established at the University of Padova.

Educational Program

Teaching activities include the following courses for the students of the School of Engineering: “Biomaterials” and “Tissue-biomaterial interactions” (Andrea Bagno); “Organic Chemistry”, “Chemistry of Biological Molecules” (Monica Dettin). The following courses are offered to the students of the PhD programmes in Industrial Engineering and in Bioengineering: “Tissue engineering: principles and applications” (Andrea Bagno) and “Bioactive surfaces for Regenerative medicine” (Monica Dettin). Advanced courses have been organized in the field of Oral Implantology under the ECM program (Continuing Education in Medicine, Italian Ministry of Health) and for the Master Programmes in “Health technology assessment (HTA)” and “New technologies for cardiopathies”.

biomat1
biomat2

Equipment

The following equipments are currently available at the Department of Industrial Engineering: peptide automatic synthesizer; automated systems for the analytical and preparative reverse phase HPLC; gel-permeation and charge exchange chromatography; circular spectropolarimetry; amino acid analyser; bioreactor for engineered heart valves; Bose Electroforce System equipped with the Biodynamic chamber.

biomat3
biomat4
biomat5