Subventions et des contributions :

Subvention ou bourse octroyée s'appliquant à plus d'un exercice financier. (2017-2018 à 2018-2019)

Globally, millions of people die, undergo amputation or suffer loss of function because some of the estimated 2-50 billion capillaries in their bodies cease to function normally. Recent advances in stenting, surgery and phamaceutics have helped bypass, open and prevent closure of small diameter arteries saving countless lives. At or below the scale of arterioles - venules the vasculature can regenerate rapidly but science has little understanding of how to purposefully direct or enhance this innate power to induce augmented regeneration. Patients simply wait for adequate healing to occur and avoid infection. Poor healing due to advanced age, diabetes and vascular disease, leads to complications such as increased post surgical mortality, failure of interventions and prolonged hospital stays. State of the art is a simple vacuum dressing that can stop fluid build up, help reduce infection and thereby accelerate healing or where feasible a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. It occurred to the applicant that the huge effort in improving oxygen diffusion into and waste out of porous electrodes to build the fuel cell powered future could also be applied to devices that could potentially replicate some of the functions of capillaries. Preliminary data with sustained oxygen delivery peroxide decomposition composites were highly encouraging such as preventing necrosis and loss of tissue in a poorly vascularized wound, maintaining avascular tissue viability long enough for revasuclarisation of a 17mm thick graft, culturing cells for 3 days at hitherto impossible densities: (1.5mm diameter spheres, density 2 x10 8 cell/ml, essentially the same cell density as organs such as the brain and heart). While we have made vast improvements on existing technology, the concept of solely providing oxygen is a very crude capillary analogue. These successes enabled by the prior discovery grant will be the starting point for adding higher level functionality to create devices that currently can only be conceived; ones that over meaningful timescales temporarily take over the role of small regions of the vasculature.
The long term objective of the proposed research program is to build smart oxygen delivery systems that locally maintain oxygen levels within predefined ranges. In our short term objectives we propose to: 1. To examine ways optimise oxygen release profiles, 2. To develop materials that can provide glucose to tissues, 3. To develop materials capable of metabolic waste removal, 4. Accelerate revascularisation and or drainage of scaffolds or avascular tissues. These activities have great potential in better understanding tissue and cell death post injury with implications for managing ischemia, the most common type of cell injury. Progress in these areas can yield new technologies for future products to sustain organs and tissues and guiding creation of next generation surgical devices and for tissue preservation.