Congratulations to A. Jon Goldberg and Morteza Haeri with the Center for Biomaterials for their cover story in the current issue of Materials Today, a high impact journal in the material sciences field. The story “Mimicking Dentin Structure – Bio-inspired Scaffolds for Dental Tissue Engineering” describes the structure created in their lab to facilitate regeneration of tooth structure.
“At the Center for Biomaterials, University of Connecticut School of Dental Medicine, we are involved in the development of innovative bio-inspired scaffolds for tooth regeneration,” states Goldberg in the article. “Dental caries (tooth decay) remains the most prevalent infectious disease and treatments using restorative dental materials suffer from problems including leakage at interfaces, deterioration, and recurrent lesions. Our ultimate clinical vision is to regenerate dentin in diseased or traumatized teeth in order to reduce or even eliminate the need for synthetic filling materials.”
The issue’s cover image shows a microtubular scaffold made from an acrylate copolymer, and was captured using a tabletop scanning electron microscope. The scaffold was made via the sacrificial fiber templating method by packing poly vinyl alcohol fibers inside a mold and polymerization of acrylate monomers around it. The fibers were subsequently washed away leaving the tubular structure behind. The cut on the right side of the image reveals the orientation of the tubules and their long aspect ratio.