Development of nanostructured biomaterials through photopolymerization within lyotropic liquid crystalline media

The application of nanotechnology has enormous potential in biomaterial engineering as previous research in materials science has demonstrated the unique and often enhanced material properties that are available through structural control on the nanometer scale. This research examines a particularly promising technique to generate nanostructured biomaterials in which the matrices of common biopolymeric materials are templated with the nanoscale morphology of various lyotropic liquid crystal (LLC) mesophases. The overall goal of this research is to determine the relationships between nanoscale LLC architecture and biopolymer properties in order to design highly tailored synthetic scaffolds for tissue engineering. This study has centered on the use of nanostructured biomaterials as platform for a microvascular promoting device, investigating a tissue engineering approach to treat a common ocular disorder, central retinal vein occlusion (CRVO).; The generation of nanostructured biomaterials has focused on the use of LLC media as both a polymerization template and as a compatibilizing platform for immiscible biopolymer blends. LLCs possess a highly ordered nanoscale arrangement of hydrophilic and hydrophobic domains that was found to restrict the phase separation of immiscible biomonomer blends, resulting in relatively homogeneous biocomposites with highly tailorable properties. In addition to compatibilization, a number of LLC template morphologies were used to impart nanoscale structure onto the networks of select biopolymers resulting in enhancements in water uptake, modulus, permeability, and degradation over the same biopolymers prepared using traditional means. Furthermore, using the LLC templating technique results in control over key biomaterial properties without changing the chemistry or biocompatibility of the biopolymer, a significant advancement in tissue engineering.; Finally, the application of select nanostructured biomaterials in an in vivo study has served to identify a number of key device parameters for the proposed ocular application including scaffold degradation rate and porosity that are important factors in cell growth and vasculature generation in the implant site. Overall, this research has not only shown that the proposed tissue engineering approach to treat CRVO is promising, but it has led to the development of nanostructured biomaterials and has demonstrated that imparted nanostructure within the matrix of LLC scaffolds is advantageous for this biomedical application.