Department of biomedical engineering

Hello, welcome to the department of biomedical engineering. My name is Elder Santos and I'm the head of the department. In our department, our research focuses on the advance to improve the human health and the healthcare in different fields. Let's have a look. At the material biology and nanobiomaterials group, we investigate the tight interaction between materials and tissues. And we aim to facilitate better interaction between these two items. The surface characterization is performed via atomic force microscopy. The technique enables to assess and capture the modified surfaces from nano to micro scale. So here at the fluorescence microscope, we can image and analyze our cells and see how they respond to our materials. This allows us to identify the optimal surface parameters in to either promote or avoid certain cell behavior. So once we have all the data on how cells are interacting with the materials, we translate these to different types of materials and thereby, we ultimately enhance the efficacy of these implants inside the human body. MRI delivers very interesting signals, but they are very difficult to measure because it's very insensitive. So what my group is doing, we take this kind of signals and translate them into light. And we do that using very small diamonds that can convert this signal. And since it's much easier to detect light, we can do that with a microscope. We have much higher sensitivity and can see much smaller things. And we do this in living cells or in living tissue. And this helps us to find out how cells behave under stress, like for example, if you give them a drug or if they have a certain disease. We develop nanomedicine for the treatment of brain diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and glioblastoma. And we are interested in how the size, shape and stiffness of nanoparticles influence the distribution of these nanoparticles in the human body. And next to the synthesis of nanomedicine that we use to encapsulate the therapeutic molecules, we also build cell models to investigate the interaction between nanoparticles and cells. And these cell models have to reflect the physiological or the better physiological situation in vivo. We believe that proper in vitro human cell models will be able to predict the behavior of nanoparticles in the human body. Here you see our blood-brain barrier model with the brain endothelial cells in green and the nanoparticles in red. And we have shown that soft nanoparticles can most efficiently cross the blood-brain barrier, which we want to exploit for drug delivery. Hello everyone and welcome to the surgical robotics lab here at the The aim of this lab is to develop novel techniques to reach challenging locations within our body. And along with our students here in the lab, the way we do this is by first developing pre-optive plans of the intervention or procedure. And using these plans and roadmaps, we control a variety of instruments. These could be flexible devices, snake-like continuum robots or going down several orders of magnitude. We're interested in trying to track, control and steer these micro-robotic systems. Bacterial Addictivity Group has two focuses. One is fundamental science, where we understand bacterial infections. And the second is treatment of bacterial-associated infections. When bacteria attach to our surface, they don't stick usually in one position. They like to dance around and move, as you can see on the computer screen behind me. However, when we treat the bacteria and dissolve the materials surrounding them, you can see now that although the video screen is moving, we actually do not see any more bacterial movement. And now we can mathematically model and tell how many contact points and the strength of those contact points between the bacteria and the surface. For treatment of bacterial infections, one solution that we have developed is photothermal nanoparticles. When we shine a near-IR laser on them, they convert the light energy to heat. And we have a select window where the heat will actually kill the bacteria, but not harm the host tissue cells. We are looking at infections on biomedical implants, like for example hip implants, because during surgery, bacteria are adhering to the hip implant and we coat this hip implant with coatings so they kill directly the bacteria. The end goal of the research of my group is to improve the quality of life of the elderly. We do that by developing symptomatic and therapeutic treatments for chronic friction-related diseases. In the human body, nature has designed special tissues for making activities like walking, bicycling, and swallowing unnoticeable by the healthy humans. But diseases like osteoarthritis, dry eye disease, and xerostomia, which often sets in for the elderly, makes the above activities difficult, causing chronic pain and irritation. Now to understand the mechanisms of these diseases, we develop ex vivo test setups to measure friction and wear, for example, of cartilage at the tongue-enamel interface and eyelid-cornea interface. Furthermore, we design molecular biomaterials to enhance hydration and lubrication. Now, for regeneration, we like to use hydrogels composed of extracellular matrix derived from skin, lungs, or cartilage. Our team aims to shape the medicine through the combination of material science, biology, chemistry, 3D printing, nanotechnology, and microfluidic technology in order to develop novel and innovative drug delivery platforms for different applications and to tackle different diseases. We develop bioinspired and bioresponsive nanomedicines, such as, for example, the porosilicon nanoparticles. We also use microfluidic-assisted technology to develop novel and innovative drug delivery platforms for tackling different diseases. And using these microchips that you see also here. Using these technologies would allow us to precisely engineer different materials and develop novel therapeutics with high potential for industrial scale-up. We also synthesize different hydrogels and patches by 3D printing or electrospinning technology for cardiac regeneration or wound repair by combining them with different photoactive nanomaterials and biomolecules. Another technology that we are working on is the development of microneedles, which are very tiny and small needles with a length of less than one millimeter. Finally, our goal is to support clinicians and medtech companies to develop more efficient treatments for different diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, while minimizing the overall costs of the current treatments in the hospital, as well as to create impact on the global healthcare. Together we enjoy every minute of our research. And we work for better, healthy years.