IT’S ALL ABOUT THE SURFACE! VIBRATIONAL SPECTROSCOPY APPLIED TO THE STUDY OF BIOMIMETIC SURFACES FOR TISSUE ENGINEERING.

Tissue engineering is a multidisciplinary field aimed at the creation of biological substitutes that restore and maintain the biological function of a damaged tissue. The key of the success of these biomedical devices lies into surface interactions with living tissues, therefore a common strategy is to create biomimetic surfaces that help cells to colonize the biomaterial, leading to tissue healing. Raman and FT-IR vibrational spectroscopies, apart from being mainly surface and non-destructive techniques, are extremely sensitive to changes in structure and molecular interactions; thus, they have been increasingly used to investigate biomimetic devices. In particular, we have used vibrational spectroscopies to investigate different biomimetic materials and to test some of their proprieties: • self-assembling peptides adsorbed on titanium surfaces for bone implants, analyzed before and after attack from free radicals (obtained by gamma-radiolysis and mimicking inflammation processes), with the aim to evaluate their capability in resisting to oxidative stress; • composite (ceramic-polymer, polymer-polymer) bioresorbable biomaterials; • hydroxyapatite nanomaterials functionalized with proteins to increase biocompatibility.