Kristi S Anseth, Ph.D

Anseth

Many of the current biomaterials in clinical use today were originally developed for other applications, and such off-the-shelf materials became a biomaterial when someone pursued the trial-and-error process of implanting the material and “seeing what happens.” In contrast to this approach, our group is pursuing new directions towards the rational design of biomaterials and, specifically, how photopolymerization processes can be used to provide numerous advantages for medical applications.

For the past few years, we have been exploring, designing, and characterizing new generations of multifunctional macromers that can be photopolymerized to form degradable networks, where the degradation is predictable and readily controlled. From a biomaterial perspective, photoinitiated polymerizations are beneficial for many reasons including fast curing rates under physiological conditions, spatial and temporal control of the polymerization, and the ability to generate complex 3D structures in situ. The resulting degradable networks are advantageous since they circumvent the need for implant retrieval and are useful in applications ranging from controlled release of drugs to tissue engineering scaffolds.

Currently, ongoing projects in our group include the design of new orthopaedic biomaterials for fracture fixation, photoencapsulation of chondrocytes for cartilage tissue engineering, biomimetic approaches to heart valve tissue engineering, microfluidic bioassays, photopolymerization of micro and nanoparticles for drug delivery, DNA delivery for tissue engineering applications, and photopolymerizable tissue adhesives. Our research combines a mixture of polymer chemistry and physics, molecular and cellular biology, and molecular simulations and modeling with fundamental engineering principles to address problems of importance to the fields of biomaterials and tissue engineering.

For details related to current research projects in our group, please visit

www.Colorado.EDU/che/ansethgroup/.