Tag Archives: UNSW

‘Smart’ fabric that’s bony

Researchers at Australia’s University of New South of Wales (UNSW) have devised a means of ‘weaving’ a material that mimics *bone tissue, periosteum according to a Jan. 11, 2017 news item on ScienceDaily,

For the first time, UNSW [University of New South Wales] biomedical engineers have woven a ‘smart’ fabric that mimics the sophisticated and complex properties of one nature’s ingenious materials, the bone tissue periosteum.

Having achieved proof of concept, the researchers are now ready to produce fabric prototypes for a range of advanced functional materials that could transform the medical, safety and transport sectors. Patents for the innovation are pending in Australia, the United States and Europe.

Potential future applications range from protective suits that stiffen under high impact for skiers, racing-car drivers and astronauts, through to ‘intelligent’ compression bandages for deep-vein thrombosis that respond to the wearer’s movement and safer steel-belt radial tyres.

A Jan. 11, 2017 UNSW press release on EurekAlert, which originated the news item, expands on the theme,

Many animal and plant tissues exhibit ‘smart’ and adaptive properties. One such material is the periosteum, a soft tissue sleeve that envelops most bony surfaces in the body. The complex arrangement of collagen, elastin and other structural proteins gives periosteum amazing resilience and provides bones with added strength under high impact loads.

Until now, a lack of scalable ‘bottom-up’ approaches by researchers has stymied their ability to use smart tissues to create advanced functional materials.

UNSW’s Paul Trainor Chair of Biomedical Engineering, Professor Melissa Knothe Tate, said her team had for the first time mapped the complex tissue architectures of the periosteum, visualised them in 3D on a computer, scaled up the key components and produced prototypes using weaving loom technology.

“The result is a series of textile swatch prototypes that mimic periosteum’s smart stress-strain properties. We have also demonstrated the feasibility of using this technique to test other fibres to produce a whole range of new textiles,” Professor Knothe Tate said.

In order to understand the functional capacity of the periosteum, the team used an incredibly high fidelity imaging system to investigate and map its architecture.

“We then tested the feasibility of rendering periosteum’s natural tissue weaves using computer-aided design software,” Professor Knothe Tate said.

The computer modelling allowed the researchers to scale up nature’s architectural patterns to weave periosteum-inspired, multidimensional fabrics using a state-of-the-art computer-controlled jacquard loom. The loom is known as the original rudimentary computer, first unveiled in 1801.

“The challenge with using collagen and elastin is their fibres, that are too small to fit into the loom. So we used elastic material that mimics elastin and silk that mimics collagen,” Professor Knothe Tate said.

In a first test of the scaled-up tissue weaving concept, a series of textile swatch prototypes were woven, using specific combinations of collagen and elastin in a twill pattern designed to mirror periosteum’s weave. Mechanical testing of the swatches showed they exhibited similar properties found in periosteum’s natural collagen and elastin weave.

First author and biomedical engineering PhD candidate, Joanna Ng, said the technique had significant implications for the development of next-generation advanced materials and mechanically functional textiles.

While the materials produced by the jacquard loom have potential manufacturing applications – one tyremaker believes a titanium weave could spawn a new generation of thinner, stronger and safer steel-belt radials – the UNSW team is ultimately focused on the machine’s human potential.

“Our longer term goal is to weave biological tissues – essentially human body parts – in the lab to replace and repair our failing joints that reflect the biology, architecture and mechanical properties of the periosteum,” Ms Ng said.

An NHMRC development grant received in November [2016] will allow the team to take its research to the next phase. The researchers will work with the Cleveland Clinic and the University of Sydney’s Professor Tony Weiss to develop and commercialise prototype bone implants for pre-clinical research, using the ‘smart’ technology, within three years.

In searching for more information about this work, I found a Winter 2015 article (PDF; pp. 8-11) by Amy Coopes and Steve Offner for UNSW Magazine about Knothe Tate and her work (Note: In Australia, winter would be what we in the Northern Hemisphere consider summer),

Tucked away in a small room in UNSW’s Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering sits a 19th century–era weaver’s wooden loom. Operated by punch cards and hooks, the machine was the first rudimentary computer when it was unveiled in 1801. While on the surface it looks like a standard Jacquard loom, it has been enhanced with motherboards integrated into each of the loom’s five hook modules and connected to a computer. This state-of-the-art technology means complex algorithms control each of the 5,000 feed-in fibres with incredible precision.

That capacity means the loom can weave with an extraordinary variety of substances, from glass and titanium to rayon and silk, a development that has attracted industry attention around the world.

The interest lies in the natural advantage woven materials have over other manufactured substances. Instead of manipulating material to create new shades or hues as in traditional weaving, the fabrics’ mechanical properties can be modulated, to be stiff at one end, for example, and more flexible at the other.

“Instead of a pattern of colours we get a pattern of mechanical properties,” says Melissa Knothe Tate, UNSW’s Paul Trainor Chair of Biomedical Engineering. “Think of a rope; it’s uniquely good in tension and in bending. Weaving is naturally strong in that way.”


The interface of mechanics and physiology is the focus of Knothe Tate’s work. In March [2015], she travelled to the United States to present another aspect of her work at a meeting of the international Orthopedic Research Society in Las Vegas. That project – which has been dubbed “Google Maps for the body” – explores the interaction between cells and their environment in osteoporosis and other degenerative musculoskeletal conditions such as osteoarthritis.

Using previously top-secret semiconductor technology developed by optics giant Zeiss, and the same approach used by Google Maps to locate users with pinpoint accuracy, Knothe Tate and her team have created “zoomable” anatomical maps from the scale of a human joint down to a single cell.

She has also spearheaded a groundbreaking partnership that includes the Cleveland Clinic, and Brown and Stanford universities to help crunch terabytes of data gathered from human hip studies – all processed with the Google technology. Analysis that once took 25 years can now be done in a matter of weeks, bringing researchers ever closer to a set of laws that govern biological behaviour. [p. 9]

I gather she was recruited from the US to work at the University of New South Wales and this article was to highlight why they recruited her and to promote the university’s biomedical engineering department, which she chairs.

Getting back to 2017, here’s a link to and citation for the paper,

Scale-up of nature’s tissue weaving algorithms to engineer advanced functional materials by Joanna L. Ng, Lillian E. Knothe, Renee M. Whan, Ulf Knothe & Melissa L. Knothe Tate. Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 40396 (2017) doi:10.1038/srep40396 Published online: 11 January 2017

This paper is open access.

One final comment, that’s a lot of people (three out of five) with the last name Knothe in the author’s list for the paper.

*’the bone tissue’ changed to ‘bone tissue’ on July 17,2017.

Risk assessments not the only path to nanotechnology regulation

Nanowerk has republished an essay about nanotechnology regulation from Australia’s The Conversation in an Aug. 25, 2015 news item (Note: A link has been removed),

When it comes to nanotechnology, Australians have shown strong support for regulation and safety testing.

One common way of deciding whether and how nanomaterials should be regulated is to conduct a risk assessment. This involves calculating the risk a substance or activity poses based on the associated hazards or dangers and the level of exposure to people or the environment.

However, our recent review (“Risk Analysis of Nanomaterials: Exposing Nanotechnology’s Naked Emperor”) found some serious shortcomings of the risk assessment process for determining the safety of nanomaterials.

We have argued that these shortcomings are so significant that risk assessment is effectively a naked emperor [reference to a children’s story “The Emperor’s New Clothes“].

The original Aug. 24, 2015 article written by Fern Wickson (Scientist/Program Coordinator at GenØk – Centre for Biosafety in Norway) and Georgia Miller (PhD candidate at UNSW [University of New South Wales], Australia) points out an oft ignored issue with regard to nanotechnology regulation,

Risk assessment has been the dominant decision-aiding tool used by regulators of new technologies for decades, despite it excluding key questions that the community cares about. [emphasis mine] For example: do we need this technology; what are the alternatives; how will it affect social relations, and; who should be involved in decision making?

Wickson and Miller also note more frequently discussed issues,

A fundamental problem is a lack of nano-specific regulation. Most sector-based regulation does not include a “trigger” for nanomaterials to face specific risk assessment. Where a substance has been approved for use in its macro form, it requires no new assessment.

Even if such a trigger were present, there is also currently no cross-sectoral or international agreement on the definition of what constitutes a nanomaterial.

Another barrier is the lack of measurement capability and validated methods for safety testing. We still do not have the means to conduct routine identification of nanomaterials in the complex “matrix” of finished products or the environment.

This makes supply chain tracking and safety testing under real-world conditions very difficult. Despite ongoing investment in safety research, the lack of validated test methods and different methods yielding diverse results allows scientific uncertainty to persist.

With regard to the first problem, the assumption that if a material at the macroscale is safe, then the same is true at the nanoscale informs regulation in Canada and, as far as I’m aware, every other constituency that has any type of nanomaterial regulation. I’ve had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, we haven’t seen any serious problems associated with the use of nanomaterials but on the other hand, these problems can be slow to emerge.

The second issue mentioned, the lack of a consistent definition internationally, seems to be a relatively common problem in a lot of areas. As far as I’m aware, there aren’t that many international agreements for safety measures. Nuclear weapons and endangered animals and plants (CITES) being two of the few that come to mind.

The lack of protocols for safety testing of nanomaterials mentioned in the last paragraph of the excerpt is of rising concern. For example, there’s my July 7, 2015 posting featuring two efforts: Nanotechnology research protocols for Environment, Health and Safety Studies in US and a nanomedicine characterization laboratory in the European Union. Despite this and other efforts, I do think more can and should be done to standardize tests and protocols (without killing new types of research and results which don’t fit the models).

The authors do seem to be presenting a circular argument with this (from their Aug. 24, 2015 article; Note: A link has been removed),

Indeed, scientific uncertainty about nanomaterials’ risk profiles is a key barrier to their reliable assessment. A review funded by the European Commission concluded that:

[…] there is still insufficient data available to conduct the in depth risk assessments required to inform the regulatory decision making process on the safety of NMs [nanomaterials].

Reliable assessment of any chemical or drug is a major problem. We do have some good risk profiles but how many times have pharmaceutical companies developed a drug that passed successfully through human clinical trials only to present a serious risk when released to the general population? Assessing risk is a very complex problem. even with risk profiles and extensive testing.

Unmentioned throughout the article are naturally occurring nanoparticles (nanomaterials) and those created inadvertently through some manufacturing or other process. In fact, we have been ingesting nanomaterials throughout time. That said, I do agree we need to carefully consider the impact that engineered nanomaterials could have on us and the environment as ever more are being added.

To that end, the authors make some suggestions (Note: Links have been removed),

There are well-developed alternate decision-aiding tools available. One is multicriteria mapping, which seeks to evaluate various perspectives on an issue. Another is problem formulation and options assessment, which expands science-based risk assessment to engage a broader range of individuals and perspectives.

There is also pedigree assessment, which explores the framing and choices taking place at each step of an assessment process so as to better understand the ambiguity of scientific inputs into political processes.

Another, though less well developed, approach popular in Europe involves a shift from risk to innovation governance, with emphasis on developing “responsible research and innovation”.

I have some hesitation about recommending this read due to Georgia Miller’s involvement and the fact that I don’t have the time to check all the references. Miller was a spokesperson for Friends of the Earth (FoE) Australia, a group which led a substantive campaign against ‘nanosunscreens’. Here’s a July 20, 2010 posting where I featured some cherrypicking/misrepresentation of data by FoE in the persons of Georgia Miller and Ian Illuminato.

My Feb. 9, 2012 posting highlights the unintended consequences (avoidance of all sunscreens by some participants in a survey) of the FoE’s campaign in Australia (Note [1]: The percentage of people likely to avoid all sunscreens due to their concerns with nanoparticles in their sunscreens was originally reported to be 17%; Note [2]: Australia has the highest incidence of skin cancer in the world),

Feb.21.12 correction: According to the information in the Feb. 20, 2012 posting on 2020 Science, the percentage of Australians likely to avoid using sunscreens is 13%,

This has just landed in my email in box from Craig Cormick at the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education in Australia, and I thought I would pass it on given the string of posts on nanoparticles in sunscreens on 2020 Science over the past few years:

“An online poll of 1,000 people, conducted in January this year, shows that one in three Australians had heard or read stories about the risks of using sunscreens with nanoparticles in them,” Dr Cormick said.

“Thirteen percent of this group were concerned or confused enough that they would be less likely to use any sunscreen, whether or not it contained nanoparticles, putting them selves at increased risk of developing potentially deadly skin cancers.

“The study also found that while one in five respondents stated they would go out of their way to avoid using sunscreens with nanoparticles in them, over three in five would need to know more information before deciding.”

This article with Fern Wickson (with whom I don’t always agree perfectly but hasn’t played any games with research that I’m know of) helps somewhat but it’s going to take more than this before I feel comfortable recommending Ms. Miller’s work for further reading.

Nanosilver resistance

Researchers at Australia’s University of New South Wales (UNSW) have published a study where they claim that bacteria have develop resistance to nanosilver, a product used widely for its antibacterial properties. From the May 8, 2013 news item on ScienceDaily,

Researchers from UNSW have cautioned that more work is needed to understand how micro-organisms respond to the disinfecting properties of silver nano-particles, increasingly used in consumer goods, and for medical and environmental applications.

Although nanosilver has effective antimicrobial properties against certain pathogens, overexposure to silver nano-particles can cause other potentially harmful organisms to rapidly adapt and flourish, a UNSW study reveals.

The May 8, 2013 UNSW news release, which originated the news item, notes,

“We found an important natural ability of a widely occurring bacteria to adapt quite rapidly to the antimicrobial action of nanosilver. This is the first unambiguous evidence of this induced adaptation,” says co-author Dr Cindy Gunawan, from the UNSW School of Chemical Engineering.

Using an experimental culture, UNSW researchers observed that nanosilver was effective in suppressing a targeted bacteria (Escherichia coli), but that its presence initiated the unexpected emergence, adaptation and abnormally fast growth of another bacteria species (Bacillus).

The news release mentions some of the implications,

The efficacy of nanosilver to suppress certain disease-causing pathogens has been well-documented, and as a result, it has become widely used in medicine to coat bandages and wound dressings. It also has environmental uses in water and air purification systems, and is used in cosmetics and detergents, and as a surface coating for things like toys and tupperware.

But the researchers say this exploitation of nanosilver’s antimicrobial properties have “gained momentum due in part to a lack of evidence for the potential development of resistant microorganisms”.

“Antimicrobial action of nanosilver is not universal and the widespread use of these products should take into consideration the potential for longer-term adverse outcomes,” says Gunawan.

The researchers say these adverse impacts could be more pronounced given the near-ubiquitous nature of the Bacillus bacteria, which originate from airborne spores, and because the resistance trait can potentially be transferred to the genes of other micro-organisms.

“For the medical use of nanosilver, this implies the potential for reduced efficacy and the development of resistant populations in clinical settings,” says co-author Dr Christopher Marquis, a senior lecturer from the UNSW School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences. [emphasis mine]

I have touched on the issue of resistance and bacteria previously in the context of finding new ways to deal with them in my Don’t kill bacteria, uninvite them posting of Aug. 13, 2012 about developing new materials that resist bacteria and and there’s my mention of Sharklet, a material based on the nanoscale properties of sharkskin and which has potential for use in hospital settings, in my Feb. 10, 2011 posting.

For those who’d like to read about this work from the University of New South Wales, the ScienceDaily news item provides a link to and a citation for the paper which has been published in Small. This paper is behind a paywall and the publisher (Wiley Online Library), puzzingly and in comparison to other publishers, has made the paper hard to find.

Canadian soil remediation expert in Australia

Back in my Nov. 4, 2011 posting where I reviewed the third episode in a limited series on nanotechnology, broadcast as a Nature of Things television science programme on  Canadian Broadcasting Corporation stations, I noted Dr. Dennis O’Carroll’s soil remediation work in southern Ontario.

There’s more news about professor O’Carroll, currently visiting Australia, in a June 4, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

“Toxic contamination of soils is an historical problem,” says Dr Denis O’Carroll, a visiting academic at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Water Research Lab. “Until the 1970s, people wrongly believed that if we put these toxins into the ground they would simply disappear – that the subsurface would act as a natural filtration unit.”

“The possibility of this waste polluting the environment, and potentially contaminating groundwater sources and remaining there for decades was ignored,” he says.

Far from magically disappearing, chemical contaminants from spilled gas and solvents, when not directly polluting surface waters, seep down into the earth, travelling through microscopic soil cracks, where they accumulate and can eventually reach the groundwater table.

Traditional clean-up methods have focussed on pumping out the contaminated water or flushing out toxins with a specially designed cleansing solution, but these are limited by difficulties in accurately pinpointing and accessing locations where contamination has occurred, says O’Carroll.

His approach is to tackle toxic contaminants with nanotechnology. O’Carroll, who is visiting UNSW from the University of Western Ontario in Canada, has been trialling an innovative new groundwater clean-up technology using metal nanoparticles 500 to 5,000 times narrower than a human hair.

There are more details about O’Carroll’s specific innovations in this field in the June 4, 2012 news item. As well, I published, in its entirety (and with permission), an excellent description of nanotechnology-enabled soil remediation by Joe Martin, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, in my March 30, 2012 posting. Here’s a tidbit from Joe’s article,

… The use of iron oxides to adsorb and immobilize metals and arsenic is not a new concept, but nano-particles offer new advantages. When I wrote “adsorb”, I was not making a spelling error; adsorption is a process by which particles adhere to the surface of another material, but do not penetrate into the interior. This makes surface area, not volume, the important characteristic. Nano-particles provide the maximum surface area-to-weight ratio, maximizing the adsorptive surfaces onto which these elements can attach. These adsorptive processes a very effective at binding and immobilizing metals and arsenic, but they do not allow for the removal of the toxic components. This may be less-than-ideal, but in places like Bangladesh, where arsenic contamination of groundwater poses major health risks, it may be just short of a miracle.

There’s an extensive list with links to further reading and videos on the topic of nanotechnology and site remediation at the end of the March 30, 2012 posting.