If you really want to understand a concept, start with the conceptual and move to the applied. Which is what Campus² Tech Talks did recently with “Smart Biomaterials,” the latest lecture at High Tech Campus Eindhoven.
The wide-ranging talk covered every facet of technologies that were science fiction only a few years ago: engineering cells by creating cell-sized structures that coax the body to regenerate everything from blood vessels to hearts.
The four speakers for Smart Biomaterials each represented a stage of how science enters the marketplace, from the early-stage research consortium to the university researchers and finally, a product. Speakers included:
Originally the TU/e Open Lecture series, the rebranded Campus² Tech Talks is the new platform where cutting-edge science meets real-world innovation. The series of talks by researchers, innovators and entrepreneurs is a collaboration between Eindhoven University of Technology (Alumni Relations) and High Tech Campus Eindhoven. The series connects academia and industry, offering fresh insights into the latest technological advancements.
In 2025, Eindhoven and High Tech Campus are competing with the world to become the global leaders in an industry with limitless applications … with the potential to improve the lives of seven billion people.
Mercedes Tuin, BOM
Moderator Mercedes Tuin, Investment Director Life Sciences & MedTech at BOM, described the four speakers being at “the crossroads between deep tech healthcare” and Eindhoven as “the global hub for biomaterials.” It has the knowledge. It has the infrastructure. And it has the ambition.
Jan Rietsema, Smart BioMaterials Consortium (SBMC)
Jan Rietsema, CEO Smart BioMaterials Consortium (SBMC) – Brainport: Global Leader in Biomaterials
Jan Rietsema said advancing smart biomaterials is essential to diversifying Brabant and making it less dependent and less focused on the semiconductor industry. So, what's the next step?
Well, it’s already happening.
SBMC has the mission to accelerate the development of biomaterials for regenerative therapies. That is, biomaterials that aid in the body healing itself. SBMC is developing a pilot production facility at HTC with clean rooms for clinical use, Rietsema said. The facility is expected to be complete by the end of April, but Rietsema has photos of the facility, which showed it close to being complete.
In HTC 11, there will be clean rooms with total size of 400 square meters and a lab rating of C for production and for clinical use. The clean rooms are projected to be ready at the end of April, and the facilities open for business this year, he said.
That will accelerate development of biomaterials and critical implants and bring these generative therapies to patients as quickly as possible, Rietsema said.
That means many collaborations, with clients making use of the SBMC laboratories and highly specialized equipment. Researchers are conducting material interaction studies to make sure new lab-created materials are safe in the human body. This will include a special biomaterials venture building program aiming to create four startups per year. “So, we are really ramping up the whole activities in the ecosystem and trying to attract more capital and more talent,” Rietsema said.
Bart Sanders, STENTiT
Bart Sanders, PhD, CEO, STENTiT – From Research to Reality: Transforming Science into Business
Moving past the theoretical and in-the-lab innovations, Bart Sanders, a bio-medical engineer and CEO of STENTiT, actually has a product. It’s a stent that is absorbed into the patient’s body while helping the body regenerate tissue.
In his presentation, he detailed how he turned his research into reality.
STENTiT, which is headquartered in HTC 10, came out of Sanders’ love of heart valves: “I really love these things.” Enough that he spent four years as a PhD candidate making fibrillated heart valves, trying to tissue-engineer these valves to see how with science, chemistry and material engineering, you could transform something non-living into new tissue.
“But back then, we were also working on something else, which was a 3D-printed stent,” he added.
Doctors insert stents to open blocked arteries. Reduced blood circulation in the leg and lower body has a huge implication for patients. They have difficulties walking. They have to pause to get the blood flow going back down to the foot. “These patients, they started with non-healing wounds, ulcers and also blue toes,” Sanders said. “And unfortunately, still today, a quarter of these patients are facing amputation.”
With STENTiT, he developed a stent that opens up the artery and is embedded in a mesh of microfibers that dissolve without any side effects. This design allows circulating blood cells to infiltrate the mesh. “The interaction with the mesh in our new cells is triggering the natural regenerating response, by which we can rebuild a new artery inside the existing artery,” Sanders said. The STENTiT approach also has potential applications farther up the body, including in the heart and brain, and for dilated arteries where patients might have an aneurysm.
That’s the science. Here’s the business.
Sanders founded STENTiT in 2017 “and I had no idea how to do business,” he told the crowd.
A biomedical engineer by training, he collaborated with international hospitals, companies, physicians and clinicians. And he learned that it takes more than only the science to get medtech products into patients. You have to protect your IP, you have to innovate and you have to keep pushing, Sanders said. STENTiT has gone from prototypes to making 1,000 devices. In the coming months, it will treat the first patients, so 2025 is an important year for STENTiT, he said.
STENTiT now has a staff of 14 people, offices and clean rooms. “But we also have a lot of fun.” Yes, you have to make money, but startups are “great fun,” and the young entrepreneur/scientist advised everyone to do it.
Carlijn Bouten, TU/e
Carlijn Bouten, PhD, Professor Department of Biomedical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology – Revolutionizing Healthcare with new Biomaterials
Carlijn Bouten, Professor Cell-Matrix Interaction, explains her work using the analogy of getting a splinter while working in your garden. Nature wants to fill that hole once the splinter is gone. The goal is to “seduce the body to make new tissues itself” through a combination of engineering, medicine and biology, Professor Bouten said.
Smart materials include polymers with bio properties, “very smart plastics developed by my colleagues at TU/e, materials that aren’t rejected by the body,” she said. “We believe this is the future to heal wounds.”
The power to heal is in your body, Professor Bouten said. But your cells need some help managing the job. Imagine an engineering department in your body, she added. Researchers use artificial structures – extra cell matrix and the scaffold – and put cells in them that grow. The scaffold is removed and what is left is a new heart valve.
Microscopic scaffolds are crucial to this, tiny structures that collected cells from the blood that become the building blocks of new tissue. For instance, a person may have a sclerosis that can’t be treated by conventional drugs. In this case, doctors could remove the diseased parts and put a biomaterial scaffold there, she said.
Maritza Rovers, TU/e Dankers Laboratory
Maritza Rovers, PhD, Dankers Laboratory, Eindhoven University of Technology – Tiny Scaffolds, Big Impact: Microgels in Tissue Engineering
Maritza Rovers, who just earned her doctorate at TU/e in designing and screening cellular microenvironments, pioneered the effort to make a new generation of scaffolds on which cells collect. The scaffolds are the size of cells themselves. These are super molecular building blocks. “basically, like Legos,” Rovers said. The goal is to give cells the best home to form on to do things like regenerate a cornea. That requires a new class of polymers (long strings of molecules) that form microgels which support the growth of new tissue as well as giving the “the right signals” for regeneration, she said.
This manipulation using extracellular matrixes, or ECMs, allows for coaxing new cells to grow over the lesions of, say, spinal column injuries.
Firstly, the scaffolds provide physical support, so it keeps everything in place. Molecules are stacked to form “the pipes of the scaffold” soft, stiff, flexible and rigid, depending on the outcome you’re looking for, Rovers said. “But secondly, it can also provide cells with the right signals. You can stir them with certain behavior so they can move, grow and proliferate.” Rovers is focused on fundamental research on how to rebuild this ECM by making these artificial matrixes or these artificial hydrogels.
The trouble is the scaffold can be out of scale. In her research, Rovers focuses on how to make hydrogels smaller. “So therefore, I made microgels, and those microgels formulate the technique that we call droplet micro-fluid,” she said.
This research is a collaboration with Aachen universities in Germany, “and they have these micro walls for these broad shapes that are also magnetic, so we can align them in the magnetic fields,” Rovers said. This could be a huge advantage to directing cells in a certain direction. “For instance, in the spinal cord injury, where you want the cells to grow over the lesion, it is quite important. So, here we included their microwaves with our hydrogels, and we see that we can align them.
“And this also makes our lighter gel very strong.”
From left: Moderator Mercedes Tuin, Jan Rietsema, Carlijn Bouten, Martiza Rovers and Bart Sanders
The Campus² Tech Talks series connects cutting-edge science with real-world innovation in the Brainport region. We bring together researchers, entrepreneurs and industry experts to highlight our position as a global hub of innovation for biomaterials and demonstrate how regional collaboration improves healthcare worldwide.