Publications by Year: 2025

Chronic wounds affect millions worldwide and lead to pain, infection, and impaired quality of life. Current wound sealing technologies for chronic wound care remain largely palliative, with poor adhesion, weak mechanical properties, and limited ability to deliver therapeutics. Emerging technologies, including autologous blood products, growth factor-enhanced scaffolds, and artificial skin, although clinically successful, are limited from widespread adoption by the high cost of production and challenging clinical workflow. Here, we present a tough adhesive-elastomer wound care technology that is mechanically robust to approximate wound edges, can adhere strongly to wet and dynamic wound surfaces, is capable of delivering antimicrobials, and supports cell migration and proliferation. This technology has the potential to address an unmet clinical need in wound healing.

The prevalence of musculoskeletal diseases such as osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, sarcopenia, and rheumatoid arthritis is rising sharply with global ageing, increasing disability rates among older adults (aged ≥60 years), diminishing quality of life, and burdening health-care systems. Current musculoskeletal care for older adults faces multiple limitations, including comorbidities, frailty, and fragmented care. High osteoarthritis prevalence in individuals older than 55 years, the mounting economic burden of osteoporotic fractures, the growing concern of muscle mass decline, and insufficient guideline implementation collectively underscore these challenges. In the USA, musculoskeletal diseases affect over 121 million people and account for the highest rate of disability among all disease groups, underscoring the need for targeted strategies. Although promising solutions encompassing advanced pharmacological therapies, regenerative medicine, and digital health technologies (including artificial intelligence) are available, they remain underutilised in existing care models. This Personal View discusses the need for personalised, multidisciplinary approaches to address these issues, advocating for collaboration among the orthopaedic, geriatric, and health-care sectors in the USA. We propose that prevention of musculoskeletal diseases is key to its effective management in ageing populations, alongside a holistic, scalable approach that integrates diagnostics, therapy, and telemedicine. Early intervention, interdisciplinary collaboration, and personalised care are essential to improving patient outcomes and addressing the growing musculoskeletal disease burden in the USA.

Background: Autogenous bone grafts are the gold standard for reconstructing critical-sized bone defects in oral and maxillofacial surgery (OMS) but have limitations such as donor site morbidity. Bone tissue engineering (BTE) offers a promising alternative, with 3D-printing enabling precise scaffold design. The influence of scaffold architecture on osteogenesis, however, requires further exploration.

Aim: This study evaluates the impact of two 3D-printed β-tricalcium phosphate (β-TCP) scaffold architectures, with 500 µm and 1000 µm macropores, on cell proliferation, osteogenic differentiation, and ex vivo bone formation in a dynamic culture.

Both rigid plastics and soft hydrogels find ample applications in engineering and medicine but bear their own disadvantages that limit their broader applications. Bonding these mechanically dissimilar materials may resolve these limitations, preserve their advantages, and offer new opportunities as biointerfaces. Here, a robust adhesion strategy is proposed to integrate highly entangled tough hydrogels and diverse plastics with high interfacial adhesion energy and strength. Systemic investigations on the effects of hydrogel monomer content and crosslink fraction revealed the significant contributions of both polymer physical entanglements and interfacial covalent bonding. This hybrid engineering strategy also enables the plastic-hydrogel composite to attenuate foreign body response caused by pristine rigid plastics in vivo in mice. This versatile materials engineering approach may be broadly applicable to other polymer-based devices commonly used in regenerative medicine and surgical robotics.

Honey has been used as an empirical wound care agent for thousands of years and continues to be investigated and used in chronic wound care. In the past few years, several commercially available medical grade honey-based products have been approved for chronic wound therapy. Clinical trials showed that the therapeutic benefit of honey depends on wound type and honey composition. Recent insights into the pharmacology of honey in wound therapy over the past two decades have led to increased interest in this natural remedy and highlighted various antimicrobial and immunomodulatory properties that contribute to its pharmacologic action. However, the interaction between honey and the wound microenvironment on wound healing remains unclear. In this perspective, the current clinical evidence supporting the use of honey in wound care is presented and highlights its molecular mechanisms of action to eventually critically discuss the opportunities and challenges of using honey in wound care.