Materiomics for Oral Disease Diagnostics and Personal Health Monitoring: Designer Biomaterials for the Next Generation Biomarkers

WJ Zhang and ML Wang and S Khalili and SW Cranford, OMICS-A JOURNAL OF INTEGRATIVE BIOLOGY, 20, 12-29 (2016).

DOI: 10.1089/omi.2015.0144

We live in exciting times for a new generation of biomarkers being enabled by advances in the design and use of biomaterials for medical and clinical applications, from nano- to macro-materials, and protein to tissue. Key challenges arise, however, due to both scientific complexity and compatibility of the interface of biology and engineered materials. The linking of mechanisms across scales by using a materials science approach to provide structure-process-property relations characterizes the emerging field of materiomics,' which offers enormous promise to provide the hitherto missing tools for biomaterial development for clinical diagnostics and the next generation biomarker applications towards personal health monitoring. Put in other words, the emerging field of materiomics represents an essentially systematic approach to the investigation of biological material systems, integrating natural functions and processes with traditional materials science perspectives. Here we outline how materiomics provides a game-changing technology platform for disruptive innovation in biomaterial science to enable the design of tailored and functional biomaterialsparticularly, the design and screening of DNA aptamers for targeting biomarkers related to oral diseases and oral health monitoring. Rigorous and complementary computational modeling and experimental techniques will provide an efficient means to develop new clinical technologies in silico, greatly accelerating the translation of materiomics-driven oral health diagnostics from concept to practice in the clinic.

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