Graphene
© UCL Mathematical Physical Sciences

Analysis… Advancing excellence

The AMBER Centre links Ireland’s leading materials science researchers together with industry to deliver real societal impact, as deputy director Professor Fergal O’Brien told Portal.

AMBER (Advanced Materials and BioEngineering Research) brings Ireland’s leading materials science researchers working across the disciplines of physics, chemistry, bioengineering and medicine together with industry to develop materials-based technologies for a range of industrial sectors, from biomaterials and medical devices to advanced manufacturing, and ICT and telecommunications.

Launched in 2013, AMBER is jointly hosted by the Trinity Centre for Bioengineering and the CRANN Institute at Trinity College Dublin, in collaboration with University College Cork and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI).

Industry engagement

The centre receives around €35m from Science Foundation Ireland and a further €23m from industry, “which is the really interesting thing,” says deputy director Professor Fergal O’Brien, speaking to Portal.

“Many of our projects are carried out in partnership with industry,” he explains, “so we are developing new technologies for industry to create new solutions for industrial problems – be they improving manufacturing processes, developing new materials, or finding new applications for existing materials in partnership with a number of companies.”

Europe has often faced criticism for being slow to turn research into commercial products, but O’Brien is confident that AMBER won’t fall at the same hurdle.

“In a nutshell that’s what the centre is about,” he says. AMBER combines world-leading basic and applied research activity within a vibrant culture of industrial engagement and commercialisation.

“Much brilliant science never actually makes it out of the lab. Our primary objective is to create new knowledge and to successfully transfer that knowledge to industry through licensing agreements, staff exchange and formal transfer of knowhow so that we can deliver tangible benefits to society.

“We are already working rapidly.”

He cites the example of Professor Jonathan Coleman, an AMBER investigator and lead of the 2D materials programme who last year attracted much attention with his discovery of a method to mass-produce pure graphene through an exfoliation process which essentially blends graphite with soap. It has since been licensed by UK company Thomas Swan Ltd., one of AMBER’s 21 industry partners, who are now beginning to commercially produce high quality graphene to the scale needed for worldwide industrial use.

Biomaterials

O’Brien’s own area of interest lies in advanced biomaterials: he is currently professor of bioengineering and regenerative medicine as well as deputy director of research at RCSI, where he heads one of the largest tissue engineering groups in Ireland. Within the biomaterials programme at AMBER much of the centre’s work focuses on regenerative medicine; working to develop biomaterials and stem cell-based therapeutics (and in combination) to repair or regenerate diseased or damaged organs.

“My group’s main focus is on the use of natural polymers. We look at the organs or tissues in the body and their components, and then develop ‘biometric’ biomaterials to address specific regenerative needs.”

Current activities involve the use of collagen (a protein found in a variety of organs and tissues in the body), usually taken from bovine sources like cattle, which is processed in such a way as to produce films of it, or patches. One use of this is currently being explored with regard to eye repair.

“We are also producing what we refer to as scaffolds – 3D porous structures made from collagen that look, and indeed act, like sponges. Using a freeze-drying or lyophilisation process we produce a highly porous sponge to which we then add different components, for instance polysaccharides or glycosaminoglycans, which make these materials better at regenerating certain tissues.”

O’Brien’s work came under the spotlight earlier this year when a bone repair technology, HydroxyColl, developed by his team of AMBER researchers within the Tissue Engineering Research Group at the RCSI was successfully used to treat an injured racehorse.

HydroxyColl consists of collagen and hydroxyapatite – the component that makes bone hard – formed into a 3D porous scaffold which acts as a bone graft substitute. Not only is this scaffold much stronger than most collagen scaffolds, but bone cells and blood vessels ‘cling’ to it as well, facilitating new tissue regeneration.

Annagh Haven, the racehorse, was suffering from a complex aneurysmal cyst which placed her jaw at risk of fracture and left her unable to chew properly, but after undergoing successful jaw reconstruction in which the cyst was removed and sheets of HydroxyColl implanted, she has returned to racing and is performing well.

AMBER has since been approached with a number of veterinary cases, says O’Brien: “We are now increasingly thinking about where we can benefit animals as well as human patients, particularly racehorses and dogs.

“People often ask me if we need to test things on animals, and the answer is that, yes, we have to in order to get through the regulatory requirements to bring products to market. But in this case, rather than using the biomaterials with a view to clinical translation, we were using them to repair. In that particular instance the horse would have been euthanised if we hadn’t intervened when we did. I think this is a nice example of using scientific research to help animals, rather than vice versa, and I hope to see similar successes follow in the coming months.”

Drug delivery

O’Brien is particularly excited about efforts at the centre using biomaterials to enhance drug delivery, including the use of biomaterials to deliver chemotherapeutics: “One of the big problems in chemotherapy is that when you inject vast quantities of a toxic chemical into the bloodstream, as well as targeting the cancer cells it attacks a number of other cells, too, making the patient very sick.

“While improvements are coming forward all the time, our vision is of a site-specific therapeutic approach whereby the biomaterials developed at AMBER could be used to deliver the treatment right to where it’s needed, to where the tumour is located locally. As well as requiring a lower dosage, this would reduce the side effects that accompany chemotherapy.

“We have also looked at having an on-demand delivery of the chemotherapeutic, where we might deliver the drug in a polymer capsule, for example, that only degrades when it goes into the body or when we apply an external pulse.”

Diabetes care

Developments in drug delivery will have further applications in such areas as cardiovascular medicine and diabetes care.

“Those suffering with severe cases of diabetes can lose limbs due to cell necrosis or their blood vessels breaking down. AMBER is presently developing therapeutics that can, by their very nature, facilitate increased blood vessel infiltration to address that need,” O’Brien explains.

In a similar area, led by Dr Garry Duffy in RCSI, the DRIVE consortium (Diabetes Reversing Implants with enhanced Viability and long-term Efficacy; grant agreement no: 645991 2015-2019) will optimise adult stem cell therapy using smart biomaterials and advanced drug delivery coupled with minimally invasive surgical devices to enhance the transplant and survival of insulin-producing pancreatic islets for the treatment of diabetes. Encompassing 14 companies across seven European countries, DRIVE represents a major interdisciplinary effort between stem cell biologists, experts in advanced drug delivery, research scientists, clinicians and research-active companies. It is being supported by funding worth €8.9m from Horizon 2020, the EU’s latest, and biggest ever, research and innovation framework programme.

EU funding

Since the centre’s launch in 2013, AMBER researchers have received more than €12m in EU funding. Seven investigators have been awarded the prestigious honour of a European Research Council (ERC) grant – winning a total of 11 – and it is this high quality of research to which O’Brien, who was himself awarded a Proof of Concept grant in February (to add to his earlier investigator award) for his work on developing microRNAs as advanced therapeutics for cartilage regeneration, credits Ireland’s impressive international research reputation. The country has been ranked third in the world for nanoscience and sixth for the quality of its research in materials science, one of the fastest growing sectors worldwide.

“We’re a small country, so I think it’s really quite remarkable that we can be ranked so highly in these specific disciplines,” says O’Brien.

“The reason for this, and the statistics prove it, is the researchers connected with AMBER. When the centre began in late 2013, six of the ten lead principal investigators (we now have 28) had already been involved in founding spin-out companies and six held ERC grants, which are increasingly being seen as the benchmark for excellence. That number has since risen, and AMBER has since announced a series of world first discoveries which have received international recognition.”

Alongside Coleman’s ‘kitchen blender’ method of mass graphene production and O’Brien’s 3D porous scaffolds, research into 2D materials led by the centre’s Professor Valeria Nicolosi has resulted in the first ink jet-printed supercapacitor device for energy storage, whilst Professor John Boland and his team have become the first researchers in the world to measure Poisson’s ratio on the nanoscale. This is expected to have a significant impact on the development of flexible electronics. Professor Daniel Kelly, meanwhile, director of Trinity Centre for Bioengineering and head of the biomaterials platform at AMBER, has won both an ERC Starting and Consolidator grant on advanced tissue engineering therapies for joint replacement. More recently, in August the centre’s Professor Michael Coey, alongside researchers from the Netherlands, Singapore, and the USA, published, for the first time, magnetism research which may have potential for storing the world’s Big Data and marks significant progress towards the aim of new, oxide-based electronics.

“AMBER’s strength,” summarises O’Brien, “is that it has brought together a cluster of very successful, experienced and commercially savvy individuals under a single umbrella.”

Collaboration

In particular, it has brought into partnership those who wouldn’t traditionally work with one another, which has opened up a wealth of opportunities. AMBER’s investigators work not only in their own groups but in co-operation across disciplines, too, “so those from an ICT background are working alongside those from the biomedicine sector and the advanced materials sector, and so on,” O’Brien explains.

“With regard biomaterials, we’re looking to combine the work going on here with that in our 2D materials programme. This is a fascinating area for me as someone who hasn’t previously worked in such a field.

“There are a multitude of reasons why this collaboration is attractive. Many of these 2D materials – like graphene, for instance, which we hear about all the time – have incredible mechanical properties, incredible thermo-conductive properties, incredible electrical properties, etc.; by combining those materials with some of the platforms that we have already developed, we can functionalise them to improve their mechanical or biochemical properties, to enhance the regenerative capacity of existing materials, or to apply them to new areas that we hadn’t previously considered.

“I was never involved with CRANN prior to AMBER’s formation, so it has provided me personally with a unique opportunity to work alongside world class physicists and chemists on a single platform.

“Little of what we do can work in isolation. Some of the technologies that have been developed at CRANN, for instance, might not have had an obvious application with regards industrial technologies or advanced manufacturing, but in my own group we’ve been able to see potential applications for them in the area of bioengineering, regenerative medicine or the medical device sector.”

AMBER is well placed to take advantage: eight of the world’s ten largest medical device companies are based in Ireland, opening up ample opportunity for industry engagement and the creation of jobs which are vital not only to the country, but to the competitiveness of the EU, as well, positioning the centre as an important player in European growth.

“We are incredibly excited and enthusiastic about AMBER’s future,” O’Brien concludes. “It’s a major investment to make on any level, let alone by a small country like Ireland, but it has already proved itself invaluable, and we are determined that it will continue to have real societal impact.”

Professor Fergal O’Brien

Deputy Director, AMBER

This article first appeared in issue 8 of Horizon 2020 Projects: Portal, which is now available here.