Abstract
Along with chemical and structural design, electrical design is rapidly becoming a key aspect of biomaterials with a view toward eliciting multiscale functionalities. This can happen in the presence of body's own electric fields at molecular, cellular, and tissue levels and can be tunable depending on the application and the state of the pathology. Electrostatic interactions can enable effective cell and tissue targeting due to weak reversible binding for applications in drug delivery. Fixed electric charges and their density in scaffolds or implants can affect cell adhesion, migration, and differentiation with implications in tissue repair and regeneration, and implant integration.
This special issue of Bioelectricity focuses on how electrostatic interactions are being incorporated into the design of biomaterials for drug delivery and tissue repair. This strategy aims to create properties that are reversible, tunable, and dynamic to effectively interact with intrinsically charged cell, matrix, and other biological components eliciting desirable biological outcomes.
The special issue begins with a perspective by Dr. Bajpayee's group on the promise of using cationic biomaterials in targeted drug delivery, the underlying charge-based mechanisms, and bio-transport phenomena while addressing outstanding concerns around toxicity and methods to mitigate them. Comprehensive reviews on using electrostatic interactions for targeting negatively charged musculoskeletal tissues such as cartilage (Dr. Blanka's group) and designing electroconductive biomimetic nanomaterials for regeneration of electroactive tissues such as bone, cardiac, and neural tissues are presented (Dr. Goh's and Dr. Webster's groups). These reviews discuss the current state of the art, challenges in the large-scale manufacturing of the biomaterials, their clinical translatability, and prospects.
The special issue also presents original research articles on designing electrostatically assembled complexes. This part includes polyamidoamine dendrimers/nucleic acid polyplexes with enhanced nuclear localization and gene delivery efficiency (by Dr. Yang and coworkers), and arginine/hyaluronic acid ionic nano-complexes for applications in wound healing and cancer therapy (by Dr. Quadir's laboratory). Also presented are a design and biodistribution analysis of multicompartmental nanoparticle system for intestinal siRNA delivery through the oral route from Dr. Amiji's group and a study on using nonuniform pulsed electric fields on skin cell modeling relevant for wound healing from Dr. Yarmush's laboratory. Finally, we present a mechanistic study by Dr. Deravi and coworkers describing how monosaccharides can electrostatically interact with collagen and regulate its stability, nucleation, and assembly.
We have been delighted with the response to our call to this special issue. In fact, the theme will be continued in a special section of the September issue of Bioelectricity where we expect more articles to appear following publication online.
We hope that you will enjoy reading the wide range of topics covered here from fundamental mechanistic studies to material design and animal validation, all within the context of role of electrostatic interactions in biology and biological applications. Charged biomaterials promise tunability in controlling, augmenting or tailoring properties in various applications and have become an exciting new area of research and clinical work within the broad field of bioelectricity.