It was effectively impossible to miss the recent clamour surrounding the science-fiction blockbuster Dune: Part Two. An all-star cast, a lauded director, a large fandom that already loved the Frank Herbert book the movie was based on. Many went to watch it, with the film grossing over $700m worldwide. Even non-cinephiles would surely have found the movie hard to avoid. Posters of the film’s leads, Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, were ubiquitous from subway billboards to downtown ad hoardings. Decked out in survival suits, inspired by the hardy desert rats of their fantasy world, the starring duo towered over those going about their less intergalactic daily business.
Looking to nature to inform the creation of systems or materials with practical utility, or to solve complex social or scientific problems, is no new occurrence. After all, observing bird flight in the 15th century allowed Leonardo da Vinci to apply bio-inspired principles to the design of flying contraptions – blueprints that would go on to inform the actual first working aeroplane circa 400 years later. Hundreds of years on from Da Vinci’s work, meanwhile, bioinspired materials can be seen across daily life: from plant-mimicking velcro to mosquito proboscis-derived needle development. With the study of capillaries, as well as starfish, being used to dictate the latest in robotics, it can even feel like bio-inspiration is pushing humanity into the realm of science fiction. It’s big business, too: the bio-inspired materials market is expected to be worth an eye-watering $73.6bn by 2032.
Such a big market cap is no surprise: modern medical life offers a plethora of challenges where nature could provide solutions. Consider, for instance, the question of antimicrobial resistance. Bacteria, fungi and viruses that no longer respond to antibiotics – as well as other medicines and sanitisation techniques – are estimated to become the leading global cause of death by 2050. With 2019 University of Michigan research showing that onefifth of objects in patients’ rooms have antimicrobialresistant superbugs on them, medical world practitioners are scrambling to ensure that equipment essential to life-saving care, everything from gloves, bandages and the fabrics on surgeons gowns, doesn’t end up becoming a factor in causing health problems in themselves.
These practical needs are echoed by institutional support. In 2015, to give one example, the United Nations conjured the phrase ‘Grand Challenges’ referring to the pressing need to solve complex, global problems that would likely need new research and grassroots ideas to be surmounted. The body’s pronouncement sparked a slew of grants, with hubs like UCL’s Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering winning financing in order to research the natural world – in an interdisciplinary manner, often looking at the structures of natural systems, or discrete parts, in order to better understand them and inspire synthetic applications – and apply them to, firstly, engineering and manufacturing challenges and latterly sustainability, urban management as well as health and well-being. “We’re at this moment where we now have the computational science and machine learning to design new materials to meet big challenges,” explains Professor Marc-Olivier Coppens, vice dean at the centre “But we’re looking at how nature, or part of nature, might resolve an issue or challenge and taking facets of that and applying it to our context.”
Musseling in to support
There are few places that better exemplify this blend of medical need and scientific support than in Spain. Here, researchers from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2) have built on decades of research to synthetically mimic the structure of the proteins in mussel secretions. Along the way, they’ve created a coating that can be applied to commonly used sanitary equipment in clinical settings, such as surgical masks and commercial plasters. For Dr Salvio Suárez-Garcia, a senior postdoctoral researcher at ICN2, these coatings have shown super-effective antimicrobial properties in tests. That’s doubly true in humid environments – such as the ones found in hospitals. “The results [of the musselderived coatings] were impressive for pathogens that are very hard to kill,” Suárez-Garcia says of bacteria and fungi like E. coli, P. aeruginosa or C. albicans. “Now we are expanding where we think we might apply this thinking, taking the same principle and using it for membranes you can attach to a wound, for skin regeneration because our material can work by targeting and killing harmful bacteria but not healthy cells.”
Water-resistant, clinically effective and with a great claim to sustainability – the molecules used in the production process are taken from the waste of wine production – it is unsurprising that Suárez-Garcia’s invention is enjoying both commercial and clinical interest. The Spain-based researcher explains that this will be as critical public grants are limited so using this research to look at targeting blastoma, brain tumours, other cancers as well as chronic wounds and ulcers – “going deeper into antimicrobial activity and then making real products for the market” – will need the commercial partnership, which is forthcoming. It presumably helps that mussels have already proved useful far beyond the hospital ward. “When the composition of mussels was first analysed and a use was found for the structure, it was initially used as an anti-corrosive,” Suárez- Garcia says – not, he adds, in hospital settings, but rather in battling rust during steel production.
$40.1bn
The current value of the global bio-inspired materials market.
Fact.MR
It’s such leaps between industries and disciplines of research, a cross-pollination, that excites UCL’s Coppens. He’s optimistic that such sector-breaking connections, as well as collaborations between physicists, chemists, engineers and biologists in bioinspired research, can help humanity find solutions to some big medical ticket problems. When we met, on a hot early-summer day in central London, Coppens explains how research designed to make industrial chemical production more sustainable – in a process itself part inspired by kidney filtration – was then repurposed for antimicrobial resistance work. “It’s synergistic,” Coppens says. “You can see how research in clean chemical production can be used for other real-world applications.” Indeed, it’s not just mussels inspiring anti-microbial work, but human kidneys (the ‘hairy’ glycocalyx structure of kidneys has informed the chemical industry and latterly antimicrobial resistant work) and insect wings (by looking at physical nanostructures). As Coppens says: “These kinds of jumps are easier to make in an interdisciplinary centre.”
35%
The percentage of revenue generated in 2022 by the wound-healing segment of the bio-inspired medical market.
Precedence Research
To the stars
What might this mean for medical materials production? Coppens suggests that with complex systems in nature often finding ways to thrive in their environment, taking this understanding to the production process can result in more scalable, efficient, sustainable solutions.
“Sustainability, circularity, better loops, improved supply chains,” he says, “it’s in our ecosystems, coral reefs, forests; it doesn’t mean we should just copy it directly but the solutions have evolved in front of us.” At the same time, Coppens points to how wasteful medical materials production can be. “Some of the ways these materials are created, like masks for Covid-19 are one use, but nature can often be creative about [solving] that waste problem.”
40%
The percentage of the global market for bio-inspired and biomimetic medical products that North America is already worth thanks to its growing geriatric population.
Precedence Research
This, as Coppens describes, results in research in a dazzling range of directions. Via a partnership with the European Space Agency, for instance, UCL has worked to keep water on space flights bacteria-free, partly inspired by studying how capillaries work. Elsewhere, one of Coppens’ researchers is mapping immune responses in the body to underpin a better understanding of cancer immunotherapy, informed by how complex ecosystems in nature deal with multiple inputs. “It’s taking the principles of looking at how ecosystems in nature work,” Coppens summarises. “And trying to better understand a tumour microenvironment; it’s more holistic, it looks at the environment.”
Back in Catalonia, ICN2 is making its own industry partnerships. “We want to have an impact on society,” Suárez-Garcia says, adding that his research, with an applicative focus, is interested in solving the problems medical companies present. Coppens, for his part, is certain this can happen, especially when connections between governments and research hubs, as well as private enterprise, are constantly improving. No wonder Coppens now believes that bio-inspiration, though a scientific stalwart for centuries, is finally coming into its own. “Now is the moment,” he says, “that ideas I had in the past, inspired by nature, can be built on due to access to new materials and computational design – though, of course, we have to do this responsibly.”
Whatever the future holds, in short, Frank Herbert would surely be proud.
