Colloidal self-healing composites: towards a new class of biomaterials for regeneration of diseased bone (ColBioBone)

Infection and cancer often cause severe bone destruction, thereby reducing a person’s health and quality of life dramatically. To treat these degenerative diseases, long-term systemic delivery of antibiotics or chemotherapeutics is still the gold standard. Unfortunately, systemic drug delivery causes severe side effects, whereas the effective drug concentration in diseased bone is often too low to reach an optimal effect. Therefore, biomaterials are increasingly used as carriers for local drug delivery. However, their therapeutic efficacy is poor due to their very invasive clinical application, their poor spatiotemporal control over drug delivery and their inability to deliver drugs directly into the interior of cells. Recently, I pioneered the synthesis of colloidal composite biomaterials which have the potential to overcome all of the above-mentioned shortcomings. These materials are both porous and self-healing due to their tunable self-assembly from submicron particles. I envisage that these unique features will render colloidal biomaterials highly permeable for cells and allow for superior bone regeneration. Moreover, I obtained preliminary evidence that the submicron-scale building blocks of colloidal biomaterials might enable intracellular drug delivery. Therefore, ColBioBone will design a new class of colloidal biomaterials which allow for i) minimally invasive delivery, ii) rapid bone regeneration even prior to biomaterial degradation, and iii) effective treatment of defects in infected or cancerous bone by intracellular codelivery of antibacterial or anticancer agents. My group will utilize state-of-the-art imaging techniques to correlate the porous and self-healing nature of colloidal biomaterials with their clinical handling and biological properties. This basic insight will be translated towards biomaterial-based solutions for unmet clinical needs in the treatment of diseased bone. Strongly supported by committed industrial partners (>365 k€ co-financing), ColBioBone will transfer this technology to the production of commercially viable biomaterials which will strongly outperform traditional biomaterials.