Revolutionizing Wound Care: Smart Biosheets With Early Infection Detection and Antimicrobial Properties

 Find out more about the results here. 

We, “biosheets”, combine enzymatic biotechnology and polymer science to create biofunctional wearables for biosensing and tissue stimulation.

Our team is dedicated to combining biotechnology and polymer science to develop a novel platform technology with applications in medical biosensing and tissue stimulation. More specifically we are incorporating electroactive enzymes into wearable conductive polymeric films. Our team consists of the two Lindau 2022 Alumni Vanessa Restrepo Schild and Tilmann Herberger. Since we met last year in Lindau we began to join forces as a team by bringing in our respective expertise in biotechnology and polymer science. Vanessa could already successfully integrate proteins in synthetic tissues [1,2]. Tilmann founded the startup “biosheets”, which recently won a 50.000 Euro funding from the startup incubator “Maximize” of the Max Planck Society. We envision that our joint development can push the frontiers of fundamental research as well as be transferred into medical application.

We plan to create a material that can exchange electrons with electroactive enzymes in order to communicate with living tissues. To achieve this goal, we are working on creating polymeric films that possess desirable properties such as high adhesion, high conductivity, matching mechanical properties with living tissue, biocompatibility and biodegradability.

Electroactive enzymes oxidize and reduce substrates via electron transfer and can thereby communicate not only with biological but also with electronic systems. We want to employ these enzymes as a communicative interface between human cells and electrodes. This opens up a plethora of applications in the realms of electro-stimulated tissue repair and biosensing.

We are looking for team members from the Lindau community and are thrilled to get to know more scientists from a range of backgrounds who are equally enthusiastic in combining biotechnology and polymer science for medical applications.

1 Schild, V. R. et al. Sci Rep 7, 1-9 (2017)
2 Hoskin, C. E. G. et al. Nat Chem 14, 650–657 (2022)

Image courtesy of Tilmann Herberger.

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