Designing better wound dressings that mimic the body

This project aims to design better wound dressings that can actively promote healing within chronic wounds. This aims to reduce the £2 billion cost to the NHS to treat chronic wounds each year and improve the health of patients suffering with these wounds; a total of 15% of diabetic patients will experience a foot ulcer, which leads patients to face long periods as inpatients and an increase in the likelihood of mortality by up to five times.

This three-year PhD project is between the School of Pharmacy and the School of Medicine. This project builds upon the highly successful high throughput screening programme established at the University of Nottingham to discover novel biomedical materials that can mimic the environment of healthy cells in order to actively instruct cells to promote healing.

The project is multi-disciplinary combining biomedical engineering and materials science with biological and medical sciences. Furthermore, the project will be highly applied and will focus on producing outcomes that can be commercially utilised. Advanced surface analysis techniques such as time of flight secondary ion mass spectrometry and atomic force microscopy will be central to the characterising surface chemistry and the development of the materials generated in this project. At the same time, this project will develop skills in cell culture and characterisation of cell phenotypes using microscopy. This project seeks to make the most of the world leading capabilities and instrumentation available at the University of Nottingham, particularly in the areas of high throughput screening, data analysis and chemical analysis.