The biomedical applications of polymer microarrays.

University of Edinburgh

Past award

Student: Matthew Simmonte

Year Award Started: 2012

Polymers have a huge medicinal potential, ranging from the passive (e.g. blood bags and catheters) to the invasive, with stents, dissolvable stitches and polymeric-based drug release systems all having a role in modern healthcare. We have developed technology which allows the efficient, streamlined creation and screening of thousands of polymers allowing the speedy identification of polymers that can control and modulate cellular function. This project aims to enable the use of the polymer microarray platform to identify new polymers for novel functional biomedical applications. In particular, the work will focus on the cellular binding and the enrichment of rare cell types from cervical smear samples and on polymers for binding or scavenging mitochondrial DNA. Identified polymers will be rapidly scaled up, allowing translation from discovery to applied materials.

Research area: Other conditions

Supervisors:

Professor Mark Bradley
School of Chemistry
Dr Colin Campbell
School of Chemistry

Regenerys Ltd (foremrly Altrika Ltd)