POB3.4: Modern materials for medical applications.
The scientists from the Silesian University of Technology belong to the international forefront in the design, controllable synthesis and methods of manufacturing bioactive low- and high-molecular weight compounds and various biomaterials, as well as their fully programmable modifications for the broadest understood biomedicine, and biotechnology. Comprehensive and original on the global scale technological solutions are primarily gained in the ‘properties-by-design’ approach, i.e. via analysis of correlation between the atomic/molecular structure, hence from intermolecular to long-range interactions, and the final physicochemical and biological properties. These properties – often combined into synergistic effects and guaranteeing multi-functionality – determine the final applications dictated by the most stringent requirements of the contemporariness. The systems in which they specialize and strictly collaborate – as the sine qua non condition of modernity – physicists, chemists, nanotechnologists, material scientists and constructors from the Silesian University of Technology include: (i) inorganic, organic, coordination, and polymer compounds as well as their combinations, (ii) nano- and microcrystalline metal alloys, (iii) nanocomposites, composite and hybrid materials, and (iv) carbon nanomaterials and their physicochemically modified hybrids and analogues. These systems – obtained in a wide range of morphologies and functional forms, from coatings through solid/complex materials to systemic solutions – offer an extremely broad scope of applications. These applications are primarily diagnostic (e.g. contrast agents for 1H and 19F magnetic resonance imaging, textronic electrocardiography), therapeutic (e.g. local drug systems, hyperthermia), theranostic, biocatalytic, constructional, biomimetic, implantological, dental, antiviral and biocidal.
