Nature-inspired adhesive biomaterials
Our main research scope is to design nature-inspired adhesive materials via catechol or gallol redox chemistry, potential application of which is cardiovascular system. In detail, we have focused on developing a variety of adhesive biomedical formulations (i.e., hydrogels, particulates) exhibiting hemostatic effect, minimally invasive, hemostatic medical devices as well as adhesion/affinity-based drug-delivery carriers based on mussel-inspired catechol/its derivatives chemistry for wet-resistant adhesion. The ultimate goal of our research is to design a new generation of biomaterial-based practical medical tools capable of diagnosing and treating actual patients.
3D printable inks and tissue fabrication (Acta Biomater. 2018, Adv. Sci. 2019)
We are interested in developing advanced 3D printable hydrogel inks with unique physicochemical properties. In 3D printing techniques, polyphenol chemistry provides an insight for designing tissue-adhesive and mechanically tough ink materials. In addition to that, we have focused on exploring conductive and injectable materials for further printing of wearable/flexible, electroactive pattern.
Hemostatic agents/medical devices (Nat. Mater. 2017, Adv. Funct. Mater. 2015)
Tissue-adhesive biomaterials have been attracted for hemostatic agents, wound closure, and other applications to multifunctional medical devices. In particular, we have developed hemostatic polymeric biomaterials for surface coating of medical tools/devices and controlling external/internal bleeding on surgical procedures. Our research scope is highly effective to solve challenging issues of delayed hemostasis from patients with chronic diseases, such as diabetes, advanced cancer, or hemophilia, patients taking aspirin and undergoing chemotherapy/cerebral surgery, and rare case patients with Ebola virus infection.
Local drug delivery for cardiovascular applications (Nat. Biomed. Eng. 2018)
A heart is an important organ of cardiovascular system to circulate blood through the whole body. Due to dynamic mechanical motions and large cardiac output, targeting drugs to the heart is inevitably challenging. Although cardiovascular diseases, such as myocardial infarction, valvular and coronary artery diseases, seriously affect the world population, direct treatment of those diseases is performed by surgical procedures such as a sternotomy or thoracotomy, which unavoidably involve incision of the chest wall. Thus, we have developed local drug/protein delivery platform to target the heart via systemic/intramyocardial injections on a basis of intermolecular affinity of catechol/gallol moieties to biomacromolecules against shear stress in vivo.