Biomedical materials chemistry
Creators: name: Rabie, Hudifah
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2021

description: Biomedical Materials Science is an emerging field that arises from the amalgamation of chemistry with the goal of tackling complicated challenges in medicine that cannot be understood or undertaken via contemporary methods and tools. While chemists and biologists alike have made tremendous strides in academia as well as the pharmaceutical industry towards understanding and developing tools and drugs for diagnostics and therapeutics, traditionally used techniques, that while powerful, are single faceted in their scope. There are countless examples of drugs with high therapeutic efficacy that are marred by off target side effects or drug scaffolds with high potential that are discarded due to their poor solubility. Materials chemistry, specifically that pertaining to the nanoscale range, provides excellent solutions for such drugs by acting as carriers that can simultaneously increase availability while improving localization at the needed therapeutic sites. Furthermore, these materials can combine functionalities by housing other moieties concurrently to form highly modular multifunctional platforms that can be easily tailored to a large variety of therapeutic targets. This approach is exceptionally appealing due to these carrier’s ability to accommodate materials with powerful physical properties that can not only enhance therapeutic efficacy, but also introduce novel utilities not seen before in contemporary drug design. This dissertation focuses on the development of such multifunctional platforms that combine cutting edge materials chemistry with advanced nanostructured architectures and conventional drugs to yield noninvasive, highly efficacious tools and therapeutics.The first chapter of this dissertation will be an introduction and overview over the various kinds of nanomaterials used for biomedical applications. Given the scope of this dissertation, there are two classes of nanomaterials that will be explored: (i) optical materials frequently featured in biomedical applications, and (ii) Magnetic nanomaterials as biomaterial actuator. This is meant to give a contemporary view on the field and prerequisite background required to approach the rest of the dissertation. The second chapter will the development of a magnetic nanoparticle-based approach towards developing therapeutic anti-cancer platforms. These platforms will showcase a nanocarrier system whose multifunctionality demonstrates synergistic improvements over their components, utilizing magnetic hyperthermia, drug loading, and targeted delivery to provide acute toxicity with high local toxicity towards the cancer without damage to other cells. The last chapter will feature a discussion on novel nanostructured phosphors designed to have enhanced optical properties. These phosphor’s properties are then used in proof-of-principal demonstrations to showcase not only the significance of their enhanced properties, but their utility directly via sensing or imaging-based applications.Overall, this dissertation serves as a study on the application of nanomaterials in the medical field as well as a detailed account on the development of several nanomaterial platforms that modulate, diagnose, and monitor biological systems. Two distinct approaches are specifically described: (i) magnetic nanoparticle theranostic anti-cancer platforms, and (iii) the design of novel nanostructured architectures the display significantly enhanced optical properties with proof-of-principle demonstrations of their utility.