MATERIOMICS: DEALING WITH COMPLEXITY IN TISSUE ENGINEERING

C.A. van Blitterswijk, D. Stamatialis, H. Unandhar, B. Papenburg, J. Rouwkema, R. Truckenmuller, A. van Apeldoorn, M. Wessling, J. de Boer.

Departments of Tissue Regeneration and Membrane Technology, University of Twente, The Netherlands.

As the human body holds some 200 cell types that synthesize a multitude of both soluble and solid actives in addition to a variety of components that provide various means of mechanical support it will be clear that extremely complex interactions stand at the basis of the proper functioning of all tissues.
With the increase of complexity, certainly when this is associated with a, at best, only partial understanding of the underlying mechanisms, special strategies need to be applied to unravel or direct processes that result from such complex interactions. Rather than striving for a full understanding of the underlying mechanisms upon which to base ones actions, it might be more productive to rapidly screen a multitude of approaches and select the one with the most optimal result. Surprisingly, in tissue engineering this approach is still largely unexplored.
In this presentation, apart from a selective overview of the current state of high throughput in tissue enineering, we will discuss the production of large libraries of material geometries that will allow us to screen thousands to millions of substrates. We propose the name MATERIOMICS for the discipline of high throughput methods in biomaterials and tissue engineering science.