(158c) Biomimesis in Drug Delivery

Biomimetic materials and systems are exceptional candidates for various controlled drug delivery applications and have enormous potential in medicine for the treatment of disease. This session will highlight recent activities in the field of biomimetic systems and their application in intelligent therapeutics and drug delivery. Biomimesis is the process of coordinating molecular recognition and interactions to design biological, biohybrid, and artificial materials that can be structurally similar to and/or function in similar ways as biological structures. In particular, the focus of this session is on current clinical significance for systems that mimic processes where the underlying molecular principles are well understood. It will include topics with emphasis in therapeutic agent delivery which involve materials consisting of (i) natural biological molecules such as proteins, oligonucleotides and polynucleotides, and/or unnatural biomolecules that have been assembled/synthesized by biological systems; (ii) hybrid structures of synthetic (e.g., polymeric chains, metal particles, etc.) and natural biological molecules (i.e., conjugated biomaterials); or (iii) materials consisting of man-made and in-vitro building blocks, such as synthetic polymers, unnatural amino acids, aptamers, helical coiled coils, materials from configurational biomimesis or molecular imprinting methods, polymerosomes, micelles, etc.