Advanced strategies for smart functional and multifunctional biomaterials and biointerfaces

This Symposium aims to bring together the community of material scientists, chemists, biologists and bioengineers to discuss the current frontiers in the interconnected areas of Biointerfaces, Smart materials and Nanobiotechnology, in the perspective of their multi-functional integration.

Scope:

Surface and interface structure and properties are known to strongly affect and govern the behavior and the performance of both structural and functional materials.

In particular, in the very special class of materials for the life science, the establishment of efficient strategies for oriented surface functionalization processes has been shown to be critical both for academic research and key technological areas, including smart biointerfaces that bridge together bionanotechnologies, biomimetic devices, tissue engineering and biohybrid systems.
The key to achieve important advances in the field of biointegrated devices resides, in fact, in the successful integration of these technological and scientific areas.

In this context, diverse and complementary contributions are needed on new biomaterials, patterning at different length scale, multi-signal integration, multiscale modelling, appropriate and innovative characterization and processing technologies for the desired biomedical and biotechnological applications. In this evolving context, the tailoring of the chemical structures of the interfaces along with the electrical, mechanical and morphological properties at nanoscale appear equally relevant to drive the interactions between living and synthetic systems.

A central aspect is then the ability to optimize the functional properties with the biologically-relevant spatial resolution, thus creating materials able to drive the responses of biomolecules, cells and finally tissues. Accordingly, in order to respond to changes in the biological environment, functional biomaterials must be able to improve device integration and control tissue regeneration.

In this view, the symposium will seek to integrate the experimental and theoretical research endeavors drawing the strengths from all the aspects of interface design and fabrication as well as characterization of the interactions at the material/biological systems interface.

Hot topics to be covered by the symposium:

• Stimuli-Responsive biointerfaces
• New materials for biomedical applications
• Functional biomaterials
• Biomolecules-surfaces interaction
• Biointerfaces engineering
• Nanoparticles-biological interaction
• Smart biohybrid materials
• Modelling of cell material interaction and biological recognition
• Biointerfaces at electrodes
• Bioelectrochemical systems