Lab of Dr Ben Almquist @ImperialBioeng. Aiming to obambulate somewhere between #MaterialsScience, #Biology & #WoundHealing. Tweets personal not @ImperialCollege
London, England
Joined October 2014
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Almquist Lab retweeted
Turning our bodies into our own pharmacies? 💊
What if a wound dressing could listen to your body's own healing cells and actively respond?
Hear from Dr Magdalene Ho and Professor Ben Almquist from the department of Bioengineering on the smart biomaterial dressing they’ve developed and successfully tested on human skin, a world first.
Find out more 👇 imperial.ac.uk/news/articles…
Nature Materials: nature.com/articles/s41563-0…
Very cool work yet again @coledeforest!
Check out our lab's new manuscript entitled "Boolean Logic-Based Control Over Recombinant Protein Biomaterial Degradability and Therapeutic Delivery", now live in Advanced Materials (@AdvPortfolio)!
🔓: doi.org/10.1002/adma.74038
Huge congrats to Murial, Ryan, and Shivani!
ALT Recombinant protein-based biomaterials offer exciting opportunities in materials design and controlled therapeutic delivery. Though their precursors can be readily synthesized with near-perfect monodispersity and sequence specificity through scalable fermentation processes, recombinant protein materials have yet to achieve the same level of multi-stimuli-responsiveness as their synthetic counterparts. Integrating cutting-edge tools from chemical biology, we autonomously compile topologically specified protein crosslinkers that can be degraded following user-programmable Boolean logic. Covalent step polymerization of these linkers into protein hydrogels yields smart materials whose cargo (e.g., bioactive proteins, cellular therapeutics) can be liberated following bulk degradation in response to user-specified input combinations.
This remains preclinical research, not yet a clinical option.
But it shows how intelligence can be encoded into materials that harvest, organise and deliver the body’s own biology in response to cells and unlock new possibilities for healing the most difficult wounds.
This precision dramatically changed the dose.
The system worked at growth-factor doses hundreds to thousands of times lower than conventional delivery approaches, and more than 2,000× lower than one clinically used growth-factor product.
Smarter delivery, not simply more drug.
What’s super cool is TrAPs didn't rely only on manufactured proteins.
They harvested growth factors made by cells at injury sites or present in blood, then concentrated and redelivered them when repair cells pulled.
This means the body supplied both the medicine and the trigger
In this new study, we tested TrAPs across three complex settings:
• Rat bone injuries: increased vascularisation
• Human skin: improved tissue–dressing integration
• Mouse skin wounds: significantly smaller wounds after 10 days
The mechanism works across tissues and species!
We first showed this concept in cell culture in 2019:
doi.org/10.1002/adma.2018063…
But a real wound is far more challenging: enzyme-rich, crowded with competing proteins and mechanically dynamic.
Could this approach survive in living, repairing tissue…and still influence healing?
The cell provides the trigger and the material provides the response.
Think of this as a form of embodied intelligence: the instructions are encoded directly into the material.
No electronics. No external command. The material responds to what healing cells naturally do.
We used our TrAPs: Traction force-Activated Payloads, DNA-based nanotech attached to a biomaterial scaffold.
They capture specific growth factors and hold them inactive.
When a repair cell grips the material and pulls, TrAPs unfold and release proteins beside that cell.
Current therapies try to compensate by delivering manufactured growth factors.
The problem? These proteins are unstable, diffuse away quickly and often require extremely high doses.
We asked whether the body’s own repair signals could be delivered more intelligently.
Healing depends on growth factors: powerful proteins that tell cells to migrate, multiply, form blood vessels and rebuild tissue.
But in difficult wounds, these signals can break down, become disorganised or disappear before repair is complete.
What if a wound dressing could let the body become its own pharmacy?
Our new Nature Materials paper shows TrAPs harvest healing proteins and release them when cells pull, helping mouse wounds close faster and accelerating repair in human skin.
doi.org/10.1038/s41563-026-0…
A thread:
Imperial Bioengineering is hiring up to 3 faculty at the Senior Lecturer/Lecturer (Associate/Assistant Professor) levels across all research areas!
Come join an exciting department here at Imperial!
Applications due 27 April.
imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-j…
Congrats, Magdalene, on winning the @FallingWallsLab Singapore pitch competition! Next stop- world finals in Berlin!
Mag pitched her incredible @imperialcollege PhD research, developing our TrAP technology into a disruptive tissue repair and wound healing platform!
So excited!
Congrats @ImperialBioeng, @AlmquistLab, & @Royalcom1851 PhD student Mag, receipient of 2024 June Wilson award by @LonMatSoc chapter of @iom3! Awarded to female student/early-stage scientist in London who shows excellence in materials science! Get ready for her upcoming paper...
Having fun discussing cool bioeng projects at #ISEF2024! Also fun meeting up with @almquistlab alum Julia to increase @ImperialBioeng representation!
Are you at ISEF and want to learn about studying bioengineering at Imperial? I'm here through Friday- let's chat! #RegeneronISEF
Delicious dinner before sending @ImperialBioeng PhD student Mag off to @coledeforest lab as a visiting researcher! Excited to see what happens w/ TrAPs over next 4 months! Thanks @Royalcom1851 for support! And to think, she just got back from a research visit to @QuinnLab_UofA...
Thanks @noliva77! It was really fun catching up and meeting your group members!
Amazing talk (as always) from the great mentor and scientist @AlmquistLab in @IQSbarcelona. Lovely to see how my postdoc project has evolved since leaving the lab 🧬🧪
