Nanomedicine in over 45,000 patients and no cancer

Title : Nanomedicine in over 45,000 patients and no cancer

Abstract:

Nanomedicine is the use of nanomaterials to improve disease prevention, detection, and treatment which has resulted in hundreds of US FDA approved medical products. While nanomedicine has been around for several decades, new technological advances are pushing its boundaries. For example, this presentation will present an over 25 year journey of commercializing nanomaterials as implants now in over 45,000 patients to date showing no signs of failure or cancer. Current medical devices face a failure rate of 5 – 10% and sometimes as high as 60% for bone cancer patients. Further, this talk will present future research directions into using atomic layer deposition (ALD) to create such nanostructures on implants to reduce infection and improve bone growth. Sensors grown off of orthopedic implants using ALD will also be discussed in which cancer cell presence on orthopedic implants can be detected and quantified. Such information can also be communicated to a handheld device to better inform surgeons on chances of implant success or failure. Such sensors can also release pharmaceutical agents and/or nanoparticles on-demand to ensure implant success. New efforts reducing the negative impact of biomaterials on the environment (both during use and during manufacturing) while retaining healing properties will also be discussed. Lastly, this talk will cover how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be combined into today’s medical devices to predict implant success or failure in the years that follow.

Biography:

Thomas J. Webster’s (H index: 136; Google Scholar) degrees are in chemical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh (B.S., 1995; USA) and in biomedical engineering from RPI (Ph.D., 2000; USA). He has served as a professor at Purdue (2000-2005), Brown (2005-2012; 2021-present), and Northeastern (2012-2021; serving as Chemical Engineering Department Chair from 2012 - 2019) Universities and has formed over a dozen companies (with some acquired by Medtronic) who have numerous FDA approved medical products currently improving human health in over 30,000 patients with no failures.  He is currently helping those companies and serves as a professor at Brown University, Saveetha University, Hebei University of Technology, UFPI, and others.  Dr. Webster has numerous awards including: 2020, World Top 2% Scientist by Citations (PLOS); 2020, SCOPUS Highly Cited Research (Top 1% Materials Science and Mixed Fields); 2021, Clarivate Top 0.1% Most Influential Researchers (Pharmacology and Toxicology); 2022, Best Materials Science Scientist by Citations (Research.com); and is a fellow of over 8 societies.  Prof. Webster is a former President of the U.S. Society for Biomaterials and has over 1,350 publications to his credit with over 70,000 citations. He was recently nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Prof. Webster also recently formed a fund to support Nigerian student research opportunities in the U.S.