Thematic research areas in development

Besides most fundamental questions, novel cost effective processes for the fabrication of thin or thick films, and surface coating or structuring still have to overcome many hurdles.

Chemical or physical vapour deposition, spray pyrolysis, thermal spraying and laser assisted ablation are examples of essential technologies associated with particle processing. They need to be much better understood from a theoretical as well as technological point of view. The manufacture of new intelligent materials from functional particles requires in particular much better under-control and understood processing methods to allow a comprehensive technology transfer to the production plant.

The creation of novel products exhibiting desirable optical, thermal, electrical, electrochemical or magnetic properties requires a better understanding of both the process parameters and the characteristics of materials. For instance, a) defining how the nature of the interface between the bulk material and the coating influences the device transport properties; or b) which surface treatment leads to adequate stress and strain level enabling production of crackfree or non delaminating coatings.

Therefore, this thematic area focuses on the development of chemical, physical or colloidal processes for the fabrication of functional coatings enabling novel properties of devices, including their detailed characterisation.

The demand of personalized medicines, i.e., medicines that optimally fit an individual patient in terms of efficacy and minimal side effects, is increasing in the medical community. This requires adequate classification of patients with respect to metabolism as well as monitoring of the therapeutic success on relevant disease biomarkers by highly sensitive, selective, and specific analytical methodologies. 

The challenge therefore arises in the engineering of materials and surfaces for diagnostics technologies, such as microarrays, in which large numbers of nucleic acids, peptides, proteins, carbohydrates, as well as cells, are presented in a format that allows rapid and highly parallel, selective and specific read-out of information concerning gene expression or protein function.

While DNA/RNA sensors are routinely used today, protein arrays, in particular membrane protein chips, require much more sophisticated surface engineering and immobilization strategies to preserve their biological activity. Protein, carbohydrate, glycosylated structures, and cell-arrayed chips are expected to become future key elements in drug discovery/screening and in medical diagnostics. Substantial effort worldwide is directed towards the development of reliable methods for array fabrication. In particular, we seek integrative engineering approaches, by combining enabling technologies (either existing or to be developed) and functional design to produce devices with improved performance (with a special focus on sensitivity, selectivity and specificity), reliability, ease of handling and cost-effectiveness. Examples include biosensor systems for analyzing protein-protein and protein-carbohydrate interactions, chip-based membrane protein arrays such as ion channel proteins and G-protein-coupled receptors, bead-based bioassays in suspension, cell-based sensor platforms, and label-free sensing (as long the required selectivity and specificity read-out is achieved). A particular focus will be on chip-based and integrated microfluidic solutions to measure biomolecular interactions quantitatively.

Cultivation of most cell types on two-dimensional planar surfaces (“cell culture plastic” substrates) is nowadays considered to be rather artificial and of limited predictive value. Basic cell-biological processes are known today to depend, to a large degree, on cell shape, dimensionality, and substrate stiffness. For instance, cells with a morphology different to the in vivo situation will undergo significant non-physiological changes in cellular function. Novel cell cultivation substrates and platforms for drug screening or toxicology evaluation, including engineered (quasi) three-dimensional micro niches, allow for improved control over different physical and biological parameters of the cell environment on the level of either single cells or defined cell clusters/spheroids. Such substrates are particularly attractive for the cultivation of stem cells, given their great potential for drug development and toxicity assessment. Studying how potential drugs affect stem cells or stem cell fate might provide a far more accurate prediction of a drug's potential toxicity than conventional cell line assays, thus potentially reducing the future need for animal testing. Novel engineered platforms in combination with microfluidics will further enable high-throughput drug/toxicology screening.

Success in these fields is strongly dependent on being able to combine and master biological surface functionalisation, substrate-based quantitative sensing of biomolecular interactions, cellular changes, and/or online monitoring of cell fate/ function as well as on implementation of micro/ nanofluidics for efficient handling of solutions in reliable devices.