By: Blake Dillon
SPOTLIGHT
Wound-healing bandages? Germ-repelling doorknobs?
McMaster University opens $22M
BIOINTERFACES INSTITUTE Think of doorknobs that repel bacteria, bandages that heal wounds, home test kits for cholesterol, and contact lenses that rarely need changing. These are the kinds of technologies being developed at the McMaster Biointerfaces Institute, which officially opened its doors in April, 2013. The $22 million institute – the first of its kind in Canada, and among the first in the world – will use high-throughput synthesis and screening technologies coupled with advanced surface characterization methods to provide a new understanding of the nature of the biological/material interface, or biointerface for short. Investigators at the lab will test millions of combinations of biological agents and complex surfaces, in pursuit of rapid solutions to stubborn health, safety and other problems. Leading researchers from a variety of disciplines will use the sophisticated, biosecure facilities to effectively sift through entire haystacks at a time in search of the proverbial needle. Work that had taken weeks in the past can now be done in hours. 12 BIOTECHNOLOGY FOCUS May 2013
John Brennan, Canada Research Chair in Bioanalytical Chemistry and Biointerfaces, and the Director of the Institute, can’t hide his enthusiasm when talking about the potential outcomes. “We already have researchers working on more comfortable contact lenses and ondemand diagnostic tools for just about (any condition) you might want … We are looking at a lot of exciting things along those lines,” he said. Simply put, Brennan and other researchers at the Biointerfaces Institute are able to make both materials that have biology built into them and materials that resist interactions with biology. His colleague, Fred Capretta, an associate professor of chemistry at McMaster and a principal investigator at the Biointerfaces Institute, echoes Brennan’s enthusiasm. He estimates the lab’s robotic systems and advanced microarray printing and assaying tools can test the reactions of tens of thou-
sands of biological samples against a variety of materials every single day, allowing them to “look for multiple needles in multiple haystacks at the same time.” Capretta explains it like this. “Traditionally, you’d take a biological sample and surface that you think might work, put them together and study them. If that doesn’t work, you discard that surface and you move on to your next surface.” But that was then and this is now. “What we’ve decided to do in this lab is high throughput, and that means doing things many times, very quickly, hundreds and thousands of samples at a time,” he said. Another McMaster colleague, biomaterials engineer Heather Sheardown, is using the Institute’s high-tech capabilities to experiment with materials designed to improve eye health, including how the eye reacts to contact lenses. Sheardown confirms that bioengineered lenses could eventually allow people to wear their invisible glasses for longer periods of time, more comfortably. That could eventually mean “the end to eye dryness” associated with contact lenses, she said. The Institute received funding from multiple sources – the Canadian Foundation for
