Engineering Scaffold Surface Shapes To Reduce Need For Drugs

Home-Engineering Scaffold Surface Shapes To Reduce Need For Drugs

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TheAcademy of Medical Scienceshas awarded Dr. Robert Owen, a researcher at theUniversity of Nottingham’sSchool of Pharmacy, a grant to study how physical surface geometry influences cell behavior, with the goal of building those cues directly into healthcare materials.

The grant is part of a £6.7 million tranche the Academy distributed across 55 early career researchers at 38 UK institutions through itsSpringboard program.

Owen’s project uses ultra-high-resolution 3D printing to build materials with precisely engineered surface features, such as microscale curves, and then observe how cells involved in bone healing and skin repair respond to them. The research tracks how those cells move, change shape, and alter gene expression and metabolic activity in response to geometry alone.

“This project will help me advance the concept of SHAPE as Medicine, using cell-scale physical features to direct cell behaviour and guide healing. By bringing together Nottingham’s strengths in advanced 3D printing, mechanobiology and analytical science, I hope this work will lay the foundations for a new way to design materials we implant into the body,” said the researcher.

Decoding How Geometry Guides Healing

The underlying premise is that physical structure can substitute for pharmacological intervention. If surface shape reliably triggers the cellular responses that drive tissue repair, it becomes possible to design biomaterials that guide healing without added drugs or growth factors. The practical targets are bone and skin repair.

The Springboard grants fund discovery-stage research before any clinical application is within reach. A viable biomaterial built on these principles is a downstream outcome, not an immediate deliverable. The same £6.7 million is also backing research into Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, infectious diseases, and chronic pain.

The additive manufacturing component here is a means, not the subject. What makes the project viable at all is that 3D printing has become precise enough to fabricate surface features at the scale cells actually sense.

Source: 3D Printing Industry