Products

Ultrastrong materials

Many materials in living organisms have truly exceptional properties.  This is because they are made hierarchically combining methods of materials design at molecular, nanometer, and micrometer scale.  We developed a new class of ultrastrong materials  that can reproduce the hierarchical organization in a manufacturing process.  The coatings and free-standing materials made from inexpensive natural clays have exceptional tensile strength, stiffness, transparency, and flexibility.

Left:  SEM image of the cross-section of biomimetic ultrastrong material which shows the layered structure

Middle: Ultrastrong and  transparent  free-standing composite membrane

Right: Demonstration of flexibility of  free-standing film.

ICC scaffolds for Three-dimensional Cell Cultures

Development of new drugs is long and expensive process.  It takes about 12 years and $900 million to bring a specific drug to the market.  A lion portion of these expenses is taken by the efficacy and toxicity screens of numerous drug candidates.  Most of them will be eliminated in costly and protracted animal and clinical testing phases.   The lack of a tissue culture assay that quantitatively measures and reliably predicts the body’s response to candidate drugs and vaccines is a burden to the vaccine and drug development industry. Numerous studies show that three-dimensional (3D) cell culture substrates provide a cellular environment much closer to real organs than traditional 2D substrates. 3D tissue cultures can mimic the actual human tissues in a test tube thus greatly improving the predictive power of in-vitro testing stage.  However 3D scaffolds currently offered commercially are not suitable for drug testing.  Many of them are opaque, rigid, and have poor reproducibility from batch to batch.  We developed a new line of 3D scaffolds called Perfecta3D that can eliminating these problems and provide a technological foundation for efficient drug discovery process in more adequate tissue cultures.  These scaffolds have unique inverted colloidal crystal (ICC) topography which makes possible highly controlled tuning of the scaffold properties to specific cells and assay conditions.  It also affords cell environment mimicking that of many vital organs. Perfecta3D can be incorporated in a standard 96/384-well plate, which can consistently generate tissue microenvironments. The 96/384-well plate format is widely accepted in drug discovery, which will greatly facilitate its integration with the current toxicity and efficacy screening processes.  

Left: Perfecta 3D scaffolds in a traditional 96-well plate for cell cultures

Middle: Scanning electron microscopy image of Perfecta3D scaffolds

Left: Confocal microscopy image of Perfecta3D with a culture of HS202 thymus epithelial cells (green) and HL60 monocytes (red).