The development of innovative biomaterials offers enormous potential for addressing significant challenges in medical and healthcare technologies. As life expectancy increases, pioneering methods are needed to replace and restore tissues and organs in the body, to improve tissue engineering and to develop robust and responsive drug delivery approaches. 

 

Biological systems provide a challenging template to replicate in biomaterial design. An exciting goal is to push biomaterials towards the complexity of biological processes, to achieve and exceed their level of control. The ability to accurately combine a number of dynamic and bioresponsive mechanisms into biomaterials would lead to unprecedented control of bio responsiveness and molecular delivery for specific applications. 

 

In particular, biomaterials built from robust and functional folded proteins offer enormous potential. By exploring the design space and understanding the diversity of naturally occurring biological systems, a wide range of dynamic functions may be possible providing a step-change in capabilities for functional biomaterials. 

 

Here we are using a novel approach using design methods to explore the building block (the folded protein) and its connectivity (the polyprotein network)

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