AMB - Advanced Materials for Biomedicine

 

Laura De Laporte is a Leibniz Professor, affiliated to AME and the Institute for Technical and Macromolecular Chemistry (ITMC) at RWTH. Her research group is mainly located at the DWI – Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials and CBMS. She studied Chemical Engineering in Ghent, Belgium, and received her PhD from Northwestern University in Evanston, IL (US). Until 2012, she worked as a Postdoc in the lab of Prof. Jeffrey Hubbell at EPFL in Switzerland.

 

The Advanced Materials for Biomedicine group of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Laura De Laporte designs biomaterial systems for Medical Systems in the field of Tissue Engineering. Cellular guidance is essential for life in multicellularity but it remains challenging to build biomaterial constructs with a native-like extracellular matrix structure and architecture, including spatiotemporal control over bio-functional domains and mechanical gradients. To study cellular processes involved in tissue formation and diseases, we apply polymeric molecular and nano- to micron-scale building blocks to assemble into soft 3D biomimetic constructs in a bottom-up manner. Hydrogels are designed with structural variations on different length scales, while the time scales have to be accounted for due to alterations upon the interaction with living cells. A better understanding of cellular processes depending on the properties and dynamics of synthetic biomaterials supplies information about the material parameters, which are most important to grow viable and functional regenerative materials for clinical use and ex vivo tissue models.