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Project

Mechanics & mechanobiology of medical textiles for cardiovascular applications

Medical implants are well established in orthopaedic applications, for example fixation plates to support fractured or weakened bone, and more recently, bone grafts to replace missing bone. For soft tissues and organs, medical textiles can be used for analogous purposes, but this research domain is much more recent, with still many unknowns regarding the requirements of the textiles in terms of mechanical properties and their interaction with the native tissues.  

This PhD will focus on two types of implantable medical textiles for vascular applications. Macroporous meshes can be used to support the dilating aortic root and arch, and microporous scaffolds can be used to stimulate endogenous tissue restoration of arteries and even valves, offering an alternative to synthetic grafts or valve replacements. However, both implant types still face many technical challenges and require design improvements to optimize long term clinical outcome and to broaden the application domain in terms of eligible patient population. The aim of this project is to create reliable in silico models that will predict the long-term outcome in these applications, ultimately enabling patient-specific design optimization.  

These in silico models will therefore need to reliably simulate: (i) The baseline situation, including an accurate representation of the biomechanical properties of the involved tissues and the medical textile (ii) The inflammation process occurring in the first postoperative weeks (iii) The interaction of the native tissues with the textile (in terms of ingrowth and tissue resorption due to stress shielding) (iv) If applicable, the degradation process of the textile (v) Growth and remodelling of the biological constituents.

Input for the development and validation of these models will be obtained from animal trials combined with mechanical testing, histological analysis and RNA sequencing.  

Date:23 Aug 2021 →  Today
Keywords:Medical technologies
Disciplines:Tissue and organ biomechanics
Project type:PhD project