Biomaterials and Bioengineering Tomorrow’s Healthcare

It is with great pleasure that I write this guest editorial for Biomatter, a journal that is rapidly evolving into an international forum highlighting innovation and insight into evolving and emerging bio-materials. Before I move to my thoughts behind the special focus issue, I would like to wholeheartedly thank Professor Pedro Granja for inviting me to do a special focus in his journal. I also take this opportunity to thank the editorial team and Landes Bioscience who have been extremely efficient in handling the many manuscripts received for this special focus, and have made this challenge a pleasure for me. To both the Editor-in-Chief and editorial team it is a testament that you're driving this journal with conviction to be a leading forum in biomaterials! My thoughts behind this challenge was to bring together some leading scientists in this ever expanding field to highlight advances made in their respective expertise , under the remit of biomaterials, which will bioengineer tomorrow's healthcare. It is my opinion that we have achieved this through this special focus and hence without further ado I take this opportunity to thank each and every author for his/her valued contribution to this issue. I would have not been able to carry out this task without you. It is a classical procedure when writing a guest editorial for one to introduce each paper as they appear in the issue. I will not follow this process but instead will leave this to the reader to do for themselves, but hope to elucidate the endeavor of how each aspect will fit together in this constantly evolving jig saw puzzle we are fighting to solve. A few examples of the endeavor we are constantly trying to solve take the form of disease, damaged and/or aging tissues or organs. In order to repair, replace and rejuvenate such tissue/organs we need to understand how they function and how they repair themselves when possible. In this context developmental biologists have been making advances in understanding how tissue and organs form and function as an organism develops. Cell and molecular biologist have in parallel been investigating and building an understanding of these developments from a molecular to cellular level. These insights have been most useful in understanding many features of developing organisms from model-based systems to humans. In fact such studies have given rise to innovative small molecular modifications and development as therapies, which target …