Celebrating 5 years of Advanced Healthcare Materials!
Authors: Jos Lenders, Irem Bayindir‐Buchhalter, Uta Göbel
Journal: Advanced Healthcare Materials (2017)

With this first issue of 2017 we are celebrating the fifth anniversary of Advanced Healthcare Materials. Starting off as a special focus section in our sister journal Advanced Materials in 2011, Advanced Healthcare Materials was launched as an independent journal in 2012. By now, it has established itself as a well-recognized journal in the biomaterials field, reflected by our strong 2016 impact factor of 5.76. Over the past five years, the journal has covered important topics as diverse as regenerative medicine, drug and gene delivery, tissue engineering, cancer therapy and bioelectronics, and we have witnessed a vast increase in submissions, downloads and citations. We would like to thank all of those who have supported the journal, whether as an Editorial board member, an author, a reviewer or a reader. Thanks to all of you, Advanced Healthcare Materials has become a great success, and with your help we are already looking forward to making its success even bigger. Just to mention a few of the best received articles we have published, we here especially would like to congratulate the chairman of our editorial board, Younan Xia, and his team, whose Review on “Electrospun Nanofibers for Regenerative Medicine” (DOI: 10.1002/adhm.201100021) is one of our top cited articles. The Reviews of our board member Xuesi Chen and his team (“Stimuli-Sensitive Synthetic Polypeptide-Based Materials for Drug and Gene Delivery”, DOI: 10.1002/adhm.201100008), and of Jeffrey Hubbell et al. (“Engineering the Regenerative Microenvironment with Biomaterials”, DOI: 10.1002/adhm.201200197) are cited equally well. The Advanced Healthcare Materials publication receiving the highest attention in the news and social media over the last year, as reflected by a high Altmetrics score, was on a “candy cotton machine” that could boost artificial organ transplantation by Leon Bellan et al. (“Development of 3D Microvascular Networks Within Gelatin Hydrogels Using Thermoresponsive Sacrificial Microfibers”, DOI: 10.1002/adhm.201500792). Studies such as “3D Bioprinting Using a Templated Porous Bioink” (DOI: 10.1002/adhm.201600022), “Sensing and Sensibility: Single-Islet-based Quality Control Assay of Cryopreserved Pancreatic Islets with Functionalized Hydrogel Microcapsules” (DOI: 10.1002/adhm.201500515) and “A Janus Mucoadhesive and Omniphobic Device for Gastrointestinal Retention” (DOI: 10.1002/adhm.201501036) received a lot of media coverage as well. We congratulate these authors on their excellent achievements. Just recently, we have appointed some new editorial board members. We welcome Kristi Anseth (University of Colorado, Boulder), who is working on biomaterial scaffolds for three-dimensional cell cultures and tissue regeneration; Jinwoo Cheon (Yonsei University, Seoul), who looks at nanomaterials and their interaction with biological systems for medical applications; Jiajun Cheng (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), who studies polymeric biomaterials and nanomedicines; Ravi Kane (Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta), who is interested in the interface between biotechnology and nanotechnology, by engineering biosurfaces and nanostructures; and Wolfgang Parak (University of Marburg, Germany), who studies the synthesis and bioconjugation of colloidal nanoparticles as well as their biological and biomedical applications. We are also happy to announce that with the growing number of submissions, we now have an even larger team of professional in-house editors, based in Weinheim, Germany, as well as in Beijing and Shanghai in China; namely, Lorna Stimson (Editor-in-Chief), Uta Goebel (Deputy Editor), Irem Bayindir-Buchhalter, Jie Cai, Emily Hu, Jos Lenders, Jing Zhu, and Ulf Scheffler. Materials science continues to find its way into an ever-wider variety of healthcare applications, as also evidenced by the content of this first issue in 2017. For instance, the team of our board member Joerg Lahann reports on how modified starch nanoparticles can be used to detect active lesions leading to dental caries in early stages, as an alternative to the traditional mirror and probe (dental explorer) method commonly used by dentists (DOI: 10.1002/adhm.201600883). The group of Pavel Levkin reports on the creation of an array of multiple identical 3D biofilm clusters, which facilitate the screening for biofilm architecture, interaction between microbial populations, as well as active medical substances (DOI: 10.1002/adhm.201601082). In the area of viral disease detection and prevention, Mark Prausnitz et al. demonstrate that microneedle patches can be employed to administer DNA-coated polymer nanoparticles for vaccination against the Ebola virus (DOI: 10.1002/adhm.201600750), and the joint work from the groups of Feng Xu and Belinda Pingguan-Murphy describes a paper-polymer hybrid material-based lateral flow assay for highly sensitive, semi-quantitative detection of Dengue infection at the point-of-care (DOI: 10.1002/adhm.201600920). New approaches to biomedical imaging within tumors remain an important topic in this issue, too. Silvio Aime et al. present a dynamic contrast enhanced approach using melanin-based water-soluble nanoparticles as promising agents for photo­acoustic imaging to evaluate the response of tumor vasculature to anti-angiogenic treatment (DOI: 10.1002/adhm.201600550). The study by the teams of Hairong Zheng and Zhen Yuan introduces protein-modified CuS nanotriangles as a platform for photoacoustic/magnetic resonance dual-modal imaging of tumors (DOI: 10.1002/adhm.201601094). In the field of regenerative medicine, our board member David Mooney and his team identify substrate stress relaxation as a potent regulator of bone regeneration (DOI: 10.1002/adhm.201601185) and the study by Susan Clarke et al. suggests calcium ion release as a surrogate measure of bioresorption in 3D tissue-engineered scaffolds, instead of the more accepted resorption pit assay (DOI: 10.1002/adhm.201600947). Also in 2017 we will continue to offer you top-quality Review-type articles. In the current issue, Jason Burdick et al., who coincidentally published a Progress Report in the very first Advanced Healthcare Materials special section (“Hyaluronic Acid Hydrogels for Biomedical Applications”, DOI: 10.1002/adma.201003963), comment on the latest advancements in engineered hydrogels for RNA-interference therapies (DOI: 10.1002/adhm.201601041). Nermin Seda Kehr et al. contribute a comprehensive Review on nanocomposite hydrogels and their applications in tissue engineering (DOI: 10.1002/adhm.201600938). “3D Bioprinting for Organ Regeneration” is well covered by Lijie Grace Zhang (DOI: 10.1002/adhm.201601118). Finally, we would like to let you know about the recent developments in the Advanced family. The newest journal member in the life science field is Advanced Biosystems (http://www.adv-biosys.com). This new journal publishes the best research into technologies that enhance and harness biological systems, such as cell and tissue engineering, synthetic biology and biomimetics, therapeutics and diagnostics, biomaterials and biotechnology, and the interaction of the biological world with physical sciences and engineering. If you are working in one of these areas, we hope that you will consider Advanced Biosystems for your future publications. Last but not least, our well-known news platform MaterialsViews.com has been transformed into Advanced Science News (http://www.advancedsciencenews.com). This new platform not only covers the best research output in materials science, but also news from a broad range of subjects such as healthcare, sustainability and technology, across disciplines as life sciences, polymer science and physics. While celebrating five years of a young journal in an emerging field, we are looking forward to the years to come, and we wish you a healthy 2017! Editors, Advanced Healthcare Materials Jos Lenders Irem Bayindir-Buchhalter Uta Göbel