About the platform
The PTBD is founded by Profs. Jan de Boer and Patricia Dankers, and the lab is hosted by the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems (ICMS) and has close ties to the Materials Technology Institute (MaTe) at TU/e.
The PTBD mission is to achieve a symbiosis of biology, material engineering, and data science to accelerate the discovery of therapeutic biomaterials. PTBD is aiming to establish a central TU/e state-of-the-art facility for efficient and flexible high throughput and automated biomaterial manufacturing, characterization, and biological screening.
Our goal is to develop better materials for medical devices, regenerative medicine products, drug delivery vehicles for oncology, immunology, and many other diseases.
The PTBD combines various laborites with a total surface area of about 300 square meters, housing a unique combination of technologies such as compound-, polymer- and material-printing robotics, droplet-based single cells analytics, high content imaging microscopes, and plate scanners.
The lab is designed for both research and education. It will enable new research lines, stimulate interdisciplinary collaboration between research groups, universities, and industrial partners, especially in the Brainport region of Eindhoven.
Platforms
The future of biomaterial, discovery
Screening of the biomaterials consists of the well-defined workflow, which can be simplified into the following steps:
- initial design,
- material fabrication,
- material characterization,
- culturing cells on the fabricated materials,
- measuring cellular response,
- generating new biomaterials designs based on the results of the screening.
Advancement in miniaturization of materials fabrication, application of robotics, and artificial intelligence allows fully automate workflow above. Automated systems can not only considerable speed up the development of new biomaterials but also eliminate artifacts that are caused by manual handling of the materials. Another benefit of the robotic approach is that it allows for collecting extensive and complete MetaData while simultaneously producing Big Biomaterial data, which can be used further to improve computational models for Biomaterial research and eventually conducting in silico screenings.
At PTBD, we are committed to developing such an automatic system that will streamline biomaterials development. The first concept is called Toby and described in the following paper.
Collaborators
Morgan Alexander Lab
Broad Institute, imaging platform
Patrick van Rijn Lab