| Introduction
An inventory of the most commonly used biomaterials, when this programme
started showed that the chosen materials were, in fact, still rather
conventional materials, which were originally developed for other applications
than biological and medical ones. This situation has changed but only slowly.
There exist today "dedicated" biomaterials that have been specifically and
intentionally developed for clinical or other applications. A pronounced
development over the time of this programme, is that the concept of biomaterials
has diversified, today including materials for medical implants (much more
dominant ten years ago), biosensors and biochips (rapidly growing),
and scaffolds for tissue engineering (also growing). One of the main goals of
biomaterials research is to develop a new generation of functional biomaterials,
which are designed to produce a biological response that is optimal for the
intended application.
From a scientific point of view, the biomaterials field is still relatively
immature. Biomaterials research is extremely multidisciplinary, including
disciplines such as the clinical sciences, laboratory medicine, anatomy,
immunology, cell biology, molecular biology, mechanical engineering, materials
science, chemistry, and physics. The development of a deeper understanding of
the mechanisms that are responsible for the complicated interaction between
biological tissue and artificial materials, have made the biomaterials research
area come closer to a number of applications that earlier were considered as
completely separate, like e.g. electronics and sensors.
About this site
This site is more or less a presentation of the Final Report from this
programme that was sent to the in
March 2004. Under pdf-files of the report are available for
download.
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