Healthcare and Science thomsonreuters.com

Over the last twenty years I have progressively moved from mechanical engineering into biomedical engineering and then into tissue engineering specifically. In the early years we were working with hospitals in Singapore, looking at customizing prostheses that is patient specific using rapid prototyping.

The key focus for us now is customizing replacement tissue that is patient specific. So if a patient loses a right ear, we make use of CAD techniques to scan the left ear and input the data into a computer system. From there we can do a mirror image, assuming that the right ear is a symmetrical opposite of the left ear. So these are the things we started to do with the hospitals in prosthesis, and then moved on into tissue scaffolds, which is basically what my main focus is now.

There are a lot of people waiting for organs but there are not enough donors and rejection rates are high. This means there is a real need to improve our knowledge and capability in this area of healthcare.

Some organs are actually very difficult to fabricate or grow; the kidney or the heart are very complex, so people are actually moving from the easier ones progressively to the harder ones. I would say that a lot of work has been done on hard tissue like bone, and the focus is now on soft tissue. For instance the cartilage and the tendons are more complex than bone but will prepare us for the complete organs such as the heart, kidney and liver.

The complexities involved actually made some decisions for us. Because there are biomaterials involved, there is cell biology and biochemistry so it requires a variety of expertise and collaboration. We have a research group which meets once a fortnight and PHD students working together with final year project students on this.

We started this work 10 years ago and a number of our papers are now being cited by others. There are not many groups working in this area and they don't offer a comprehensive scaffold library like ours. We have taken it from the very ground level and developed it into a full grown library, with automated tools inside. We can automatically stitch the form of the structure that you need. All of these things are validated and we have tried this with various fabrication methods and it works.

I use Thomson Reuters almost daily because of the new papers, which I scan and circulate to my staff and students. I can see the type of groups which are citing us and what kind of work they are doing. I also update my own statistics when new data comes in. We also use the database when we are drafting a research proposal or when we are writing journal and conference papers.