Biomaterial Highlights of 2019—Biofabrication, Tissue Engineering, Nanomedicine, and More
Authors: Irem Bayindir‐Buchhalter, Emily Hu, Uta Göbel
Journal: Advanced Healthcare Materials (2020)

With another decade coming to an end, we are proud to work on one of the leading journals in the field of biomaterials. With its latest Impact Factor of 6.270 (an increase of 12% compared to the year before) Advanced Healthcare Materials (AHM) has proven its impact within the field. The journal was founded to cover high-impact materials, devices, and technologies for improving human health. However, to strengthen the point that AHM covers broad scope biomaterials science, we recently updated the journal's Aims and Scope to include all relevant keywords. As such, today, AHM covers all types of biomaterials and biointerfaces, nanomedicine and nanotechnology, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, as well as the fast-moving fields of biofabrication and devices, including diagnostics and wearables (see the full Aims and Scopes online). In 2019 Uta Göbel took over as Editor-in-Chief from Lorna Stimson. Lorna has taken up a new role in coordinating Wiley's partnership activities with the Max-Planck Society and the German research community which follows the nationwide agreement that Wiley signed with Projekt DEAL, actively promoting open research. We are very grateful for all the work Lorna has invested to launch and foster AHM. Following this transition, Irem Bayindir-Buchhalter has received a well-deserved promotion and is now Deputy Editor for AHM. For this Editorial we have asked the journal's Editorial Advisory Board members to nominate their highlights in biomaterials research of the last year, published in AHM or elsewhere. These contributions nicely reflect growing areas in the field. Although we are still far from clinical realization of bioprinted functional tissues and organs, certainly the field of biofabrication is the most notable to mention. In public media the 3D printing of a heart by Tal Dvir gained a lot of attention (https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.201900344). However, there is a long way to go from printing a personalized hydrogel and cells in the shape of a human heart, to a fully functional and full-size heart for organ transplantation. A huge step forward in creating multivascular networks and within biocompatible hydrogels was reported from the collaboration of the Kelly R. Stevens and Jordan S. Miller labs (https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aav9750), advancing the use of soft materials in biofabrication. The developed techniques in this paper were used to fabricate complex hydrogel structures including entangled vascular networks and mixing chambers, to model alveolar structure's hepatic tissue. AHM kept up with this trend and contributed to this field with a special issue on Building Blocks for Biofabricated Models. Guest-edited by Jos Malda and Jürgen Groll, this issue focuses on materials and technological building blocks that are tailored for the fabrication of 3D tissue models. To showcase only one of the many great manuscripts published in this issue, the work of Paul Dalton and colleagues demonstrates handy spheroid patterning and thick, long-term cell sheet formation using melt electrowritten scaffolds (https://doi.org/10.1002/adhm.201801326). Melt electrowriting is certainly a technology which will see further innovation and application within biomaterials research, which was nicely reviewed last year (https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.201904664). Moving further toward applications, bone and cartilage regeneration was amongst the most-studied research areas in the field. Following the 3D printing trend, Ling Qin and colleagues created a 3D composite material containing Mg powder in a scaffold that could support bone regeneration due to its osteogenic and angiogenic properties, providing a complete study from material generation, safety analysis, and presentation of the in vivo application (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biomaterials.2019.01.013). Published in AHM, the lab of Yufeng Zhang (https://doi.org/10.1002/adhm.201901030) underlines the importance of Mg2+ in bone mineralization, a factor that, unlike Ca2+, had been long overlooked. Xuesi Chen and colleagues (https://doi.org/10.1002/adhm.201900312) report on the development of hydrophobic and stereocomplex interactions-enhanced thermogels that offer regenerative solutions to irregular cartilage defects. Nanomedicine is another area that gained further momentum. With the aim of contributing to the quest to cure various diseases, biomaterial research has been at the core of it. In recognition of this, AHM published two special issues last year. Molecular Engineering: From Molecules to Medicine, guest-edited by Can Zhang and Xiaohu Gao, provides a deep understanding of molecule engineering principles for various materials, from polymers and soft materials to nanoparticles, toward the translation to medicine. The special issue Tailoring Biomaterials for Metabolic Diseases, guest-edited by Zhen Gu, focuses on how to use biomaterials' associated formulations and devices to tackle metabolic diseases, from diabetes to obesity. In addition to these themed issues, contributions such as the one by Jinming Zhang, Shu Wang, and Jun Zhang's labs (https://doi.org/10.1002/adhm.201801591)—which describes a water-soluble and non-toxic cellulose-based photosensitizer with photodynamic antibacterial activity and can be easily applied as a sunlight-driven wearable coating—promote this field further. Another key area within biomaterials and nanomedicine research was immunoengineering. The area flourished after the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo for their discoveries in cancer immunotherapy. One example is the design and development of bioactive materials described in the work of Daniel G. Anderson et al. (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-019-0247-3), whereby lipid-like materials for mRNA delivery are used as vaccines against melanoma, which are believed to boost cancer immunotherapy. To highlight this topic AHM has published a special issue on Biointerfaces for Immunoengineering, guest-edited by Weiqiang Chen and Deok-Ho Kim. It provides a comprehensive summary of biomaterials research related to immune functions, including results related to cell/molecular immunobiology, microfluidics-based diagnostics and disease modeling, tissue engineering, and mechanobiology. We sincerely thank our Editorial Advisory Board members for their suggestions regarding biomaterial highlights and also their continued support, especially Younan Xia, AHM's Editorial Board chairman. We thank all authors for their trust in submitting their work to us, and last but not least, our reviewers for their fair and timely assessment to shape the quality of the journal. We are looking forward to an exciting 2020 of biomaterials research!