Tailoring Materials-Tissue Interfaces

By 2030, NIH predicts that 72 million Americans will be 65 or older and nearly 80% of them will suffer a chronic health condition that requires tissue, joint or organ repair. Biomaterials will be key to meeting this demand. Used in more than 500 million medical devices, biomaterials are key components of implants, stents, catheters, and drug delivery systems. However, these devices present a myriad of tissue-material interactions including infection, fouling and rejection----events that can lead to further damage, pain, suffering or failure.

Materials and peptide engineering, computational modeling, and biology are integrated to rationally design materials for compatibility with relevant tissue-repair processes or to provide targeted biological cues to promote health and healing. The material/cellular and material/tissue interfacial microenvironments are rigorously analyzed to identify key features within the interfacial micro-environment ― features that must be harnessed to engineer biomaterials that will promote tissue healing and health. This knowledge is used to design smart “biologically aware” materials --- for example, materials that can simultaneously promote tissue repair while inhibiting bacterial attachment that could lead to infection and failure.

Publications (selected):

VanOosten SK, Yuca E, Karaca BT, Boone K, Snead ML, Spencer P, Tamerler C.  Bio-Silver Nanoparticle Interface Offers Improved Cell Viability. Surface Innovations 4(3):121-132, 2016

Ye Q, Spencer P, Yuca E, Tamerler C.  Engineered Peptide Repairs Defective Adhesive-Dentin Interface. Macromolecular Materials and Engineering. 302:1600487, 2017.

Boone K, Camarda KV, Spencer P, Tamerler C. Antimicrobial Peptide Similarity and Classification through Rough Set Theory Using Physicochemical Boundaries. BMC Bioinformatics 19:469-479, 2018

Xie SX, Boone K, VanOosten SK, Yuca E, Song L, Ge X, Ye Q, Spencer P, Tamerler C. Peptide Mediated Antimicrobial Dental Adhesive System. Appl Sci 9:557, 2019 doi: 10.3390/app9030557

Xie SX, Song L, Yuca E, Boone K, Sarikaya R, VanOosten SK, Misra A, Ye Q, Spencer P, Tamerler C. Antimicrobial peptide-polymer conjugates for dentistry. ACS Appl Polymer Materials. 2(3): 1134-1144, March 13, 2020

Sarikaya R, Song L, Yuca E, Xie SX, Boone K, Misra A, Spencer P, Tamerler C. Bio-inspired Multifunctional Adhesive System for Next Generation Bio-addivitely Designed Dental Restorations. J Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials 113:104135, 2021.

Paulette Spencer, Qiang Ye, Nilan J. B. Kamathewatta, Sarah K. Woolfolk, Brenda S. Bohaty, Anil Misra, and Candan Tamerler.  Chemometrics-Assisted Raman Spectroscopy Characterization of Tunable Polymer-Peptide Hybrids for Dental Tissue Repair. Frontiers in Materials 8:681415, 2021

Boone K, Wisdom C, Camarda K, Spencer P, Tamerler C. Combining Genetic Algorithm with Machine Learning Strategies for Designing Potent Antimicrobial Peptides. BMC Bioinformatics 22:239, 2021.

Esra Yuca, Sheng-Xue Xie, Linyong Song, Kyle Boone, Sarah K. Woolfolk, Nilan Kamathewatta, Philip Elrod, Qiang Ye, Paulette Spencer, and Candan Tamerler. Reconfigurable Dual Peptide Tethered Polymer System Offers a Synergistic Solution for Next Generation Dental Adhesives. International J of Molecular Sciences 22:6552, 2021