The United Kingdom and others must not overlook the potential for nanotechnology to boost regenerative medicine.
Andemariam Teklesenbet Beyene has benefited from a multidisciplinary approach to surgery. In June, the postgraduate student's cancer-riddled windpipe was replaced with one that had been created in a laboratory. Scientists at University College London created a glass replica of his trachea and two main bronchi, onto which they deposited layers of a porous polymer nanocomposite. Colleagues in Sweden soaked the structure in a solution of Beyene's bone-marrow stem cells to create a fully synthetic organ for transplantation. Windpipes have been replaced before, but Beyene's operation was unique in that no donor was required and there is no risk of rejection. The procedure was a triumph of cooperation, both between international researchers and between the physical and biological sciences.
Materials science has long been recognized as important in such advances. But the field's role is not confined to building biomimetic scaffolds for tissues and organs. The elasticity and surface topography of substrates can control stem-cell growth and differentiation, so materials research can help scientists to prepare cells for clinical use. And it can unravel the biological mechanisms that direct stem-cell behaviour.
Nanotechnology allows researchers to create materials with exquisitely fine structural detail, which are set to be increasingly useful in biology and medicine. Where surface structure and chemistry can be engineered to the cellular and subcellular level, scientists have unprecedented control in probing the responses of cells to their environment.
A paper in this month's Nature Materials reports a nanostructured substrate that can maintain stem-cell viability and allow cells to grow for eight weeks (R. J. McMurray et al. Nature Mater. 10, 637–644; 2011). Cells cultured on these surfaces provide insight into the biomolecular factors that control cell-signalling pathways.
But high-profile success of clinical work using tissue scaffolds could draw attention, and funding, away from such fundamental contributions. This may already be happening, at least in Britain. In July, just over a week after news broke of Beyene's operation, the UK government's Office of Life Sciences published a report called Taking Stock of Regenerative Medicine in the United Kingdom. It recognizes that research in the physical sciences is needed to move regenerative medicine from the laboratory to the clinic, and notes that new materials, diagnostics and imaging are needed. But it frames useful materials research solely in terms of engineering scaffolds for delivery and application.
In doing so, the government misses an opportunity to outline a remit to investigate materials and the way they control stem cells. Such an approach would help biomedical engineers to design scaffolds and matrices with cell behaviour as a priority, rather than an afterthought.
And although the paper in Nature Materials and the engineered trachea (both UK-based research efforts) show that nanotechnology is important to all areas of regenerative medicine, the word nanotechnology does not feature once in the report's 58 pages.
The United Kingdom has no ongoing funding programme that specifically focuses on nanotechnology. In July, Cientifica, a nanotechnology consultancy based in London, released an assessment of global spending in the field that placed Britain almost last, just above India. Richard Jones, a former nanotechnology adviser to the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, argues on his blog that Britain has given up on nanotechnology (http://go.nature.com/xxoy9x).
To help to reverse the trend, scientists, universities and funders should highlight research areas in which nanotechnologists can contribute to scientific success. Regenerative medicine offers such an opportunity.
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Start small, think big. Nature 476, 251 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/476251a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/476251a