Imagine a hip replacement that is not only optimized to connect perfectly with the body, but also contains tiny sensors to alert doctors if there’s any problem. Now imagine it being widely available and affordable, manufactured in high-tech facilities in India.
That’s the kind of outcome envisioned by the new Indo-U.S. Center for Biomaterials for Health Care, a partnership led by Brown University and an Indian technology institute launched in January with roughly $1.2 million for two years from a joint U.S.-Indian government fund.
Biomaterials are artificial and organic materials that are compatible with the human body, used for everything from surgical materials, to contact lenses, dental crowns, joint replacements, implants and scaffolds for tissue grafts.
Brown University has been growing its expertise in that field in recent years, bringing together life sciences and materials-engineering researchers as well as clinicians to advance existing technologies and explore the potential of nanomaterials, especially, in medicine.
In India, meanwhile, industry giants such as Johnson & Johnson and smaller biomaterials firms have already set up manufacturing operations, and scientists at government-sponsored labs are working to perfect ceramics, metals, nanofibers and other materials.
The new center, led by Thomas Webster, an associate professor of engineering and orthopedics at Brown, and Bikramjit Basu, an associate professor of materials and metallurgical engineering at the India Institute of Technology at Kanpur, aims to combine the strengths in both countries and help shape the future of biomaterials.
Webster said the collaboration grew out of a biomaterials conference that Basu hosted two summers ago. After discussions at that event, both men wrote a grant proposal to the Indo-U.S. Technology Fund, a nonprofit society established by the Indian and U.S. governments in 2000, and theirs is now the biggest project underwritten by the fund.
The main goal, Webster said, is to lay the groundwork for a strong international biomaterials industry in India, just as other sectors have been establishing a presence in the country, lured by the work force and the inexpensive facilities.
“We thought if biomaterials doesn’t start doing this, we might be lost in the shuffle,” he said. “We might get lost in the dust if we don’t start thinking of ways to take advantage of India being the emerging manufacturing place.”
The “new frontier” the center will pursue is built on nanotechnology, Webster said – using small particles and small surface features that mimic the natural roughness of the body. U.S. scientists at Brown and at the University of Washington and the University of Texas will work to improve some of the materials already being made in India. They will also develop animal studies and other mechanisms to test the materials’ effectiveness.
What they’ll be aiming for, Webster said, is to create a new generation of biomaterials that don’t just work better, but also last longer than 10 years, the current lifespan of most hip implants, for example. Plus they’ll work to develop sensors – a special interest of Webster’s – to determine whether implants are succeeding in the body.
“The whole idea is somebody who gets, for example, a hip implant, you really don’t know it’s failing until you feel pain,” he said. “What we would like to do is figure that out much earlier, so that you can actually intervene and do something to make that implant more successful.”
The center is taking on several different projects, including the sensors, improving implant surfaces, perfecting soft-tissue implants and scaffold materials and getting all that science from the lab into the real world, with industrial-scale manufacturing in India.
Each project has U.S. and Indian participants, Webster said, and industry will also be involved, such as Materials Processing Inc. located in Texas, which has close ties to biomaterials research and could take products through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval process.
Given the differences between U.S. and Indian intellectual property laws, and the diverse institutions involved, commercialization is one of the trickier parts of the center’s work, Webster said. So the researchers have obtained provisional patents on the ideas they are bringing to the table, “but we know we’re going to come up with new ideas, and we’re looking at how we are going to handle it.”
The projects also won’t be fully developed at the center, Webster noted, but rather the goal is to “incubate” them there, then pursue additional grants as appropriate.
And there’s more to the partnership than research and development, Webster stressed. There is also a strong educational component. Students and faculty will be exchanged, he said, allowing researchers from both countries to learn from one another. •
