Speaker
Description
It is clear that humans consume more natural resources to meet all the needs of our growing population and modern lifestyle, but those resources being depleted at an alarming rate. Also, in order to enable continued progress and improve human life, it is necessary to develop new materials with improved properties. For this reason, researchers must invest a great deal of effort into finding sustainable solutions to address the potential raw materials sources crisis and to develop novel materials able to meet the needs of new human habits. Development of bio-based materials with advanced properties seems to be a good solution for that problem . The growing pressure for resolving ecological problems, but also to shift research toward circular economy, makes bio-renewable and biodegradable materials, such as poly(lactide) (PLA) very important. Given that a convenient approach can manipulate the structure of PLA at the molecular level, enables the development of different methods for the production of a wide range of PLA with suitable properties. The development of novel polymerization techniques (such as polymerisation in microwave field ) allows the economical production of high molecular weight PLA, resulting in expanded use of PLA in packaging, medical or pharmaceutical applications, in agriculture to prevent freezing, as a system for self-healing of concrete and so on. The architecture of PLA based polymers can be modified by incorporating multifunctional monomers into the polymer chain in order to obtain bio-based materials with advanced properties. The aim of our works was the investigation of the influence of castor oil, isosorbide and functionalised multiwall carbon nanotubes, as multifunctional macro initiator, on the properties of polymers based on lactide .
Poly(lactide) can be designed to biodegrade within a reasonable timescale, which makes this polymer an ideal candidate for use in biomedical and pharmaceutical purposes. In order to meet an increasing number of requests and achieve better therapeutic efficiency of the drugs, significant efforts in developing new and improving existing PLA based drug delivery systems (DDS) are invested . The aim of our research is the development of PLA based multimodal wound dressing with antimicrobial and immunomodulatory properties, capable of addressing early to mid-stages of wound healing process. For DDS we used poly(lactide) as a matrix (in dentistry) or microspheres carrier (for oral application) for different active compounds. The potential that PLA is showing in newer applications in biomedicine, such as tissue engineering and wound healing, indicates that PLA will become an important material for the future high-value medical market.
The combination of suitable physical properties, such as transparency and biodegradability, makes poly(lactide) also suitable for use as packaging . Special design enables fine tuning of electrical and/or optical properties of PLA based conductive polymers which make them suitable for novel application, in which traditional conductors cannot be applied. We have developed PLA based conductive fibers, using electrospinning process . Such novel materials are coveted in various fields of biomedicine such as bioengineering, regenerative medicine, and biosensors, and consider as potential foundation for future research.
