Inside the Labcoat
EPISODE 5
Hydrogels, Bioplastics, and the Future of Biomaterials
With Dr Favour Obuseh
About the Guest
As a high school student, Dr. Favour Obuseh sought a way to combine his interests in biology, physics, and chemistry into a single career path. He went on to study bioengineering and biomedical engineering at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he was first introduced to hydrogels through research in a biomaterials laboratory. He later pursued a PhD in the Harvard–MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, conducting his doctoral research in the Mooney Lab at Harvard University, where he explored the limits of hydrogel applications. Through this work, he developed a passion for biomaterials and immunoengineering, with the goal of applying these technologies to improve health outcomes.
Research Areas:
Biomaterials – Immunoengineering – Hydrogels – Translational Medicine
Key Takeaways:
Hydrogels can be broadly classified into natural materials, such as collagen and alginate, and synthetic hydrogels. While natural hydrogels often face challenges such as batch-to-batch variability and limited stiffness, synthetic hydrogels can raise concerns regarding biocompatibility and toxicity
By combining different types of hydrogels through entanglements, engineers can create materials that integrate the advantages of each while minimising their individual limitations. One important example is producing hydrogels that are stiff enough to remain stable, yet sufficiently flexible for surgical applications
Despite these advances, several challenges remain, including understanding how these materials degrade after use, refining their properties to achieve specific functions, and matching their mechanical characteristics to the surrounding tissue in order to minimise the foreign body response.
Main Topics Covered: Hydrogels – Drug Delivery – Stealth Coating – Foreign Body Response – Stiffness Control – Immunoengineering