Interview with Melissa Tate

The material can be used for clothing, wearables (multifunctional devices that interact with the body, typically when worn on the body) and next generation implants that are wearables for the inside of the body so to speak.

I have been studying the inner workings of the body since I was a child. As an undergraduate at Stanford University, I had the opportunity to join a research group of an orthopaedic pioneer at Stanford, Professor Dennis Carter. Having read all of Darwin, D'Arcy Thompson and Stephen Jay Gould's work I could get my hands on, working in the lab just fed my appetite to know how cells could be so smart even though they are brainless. I have been extremely fortunate to find stimulating and supportive environments and mentors who enabled me to grow intellectually and to constantly question things, such as Professor Stephan Perren, my mentor at the AO Research Institute in Davos, and Professor Peter Niederer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

The biggest challenge is reducing a big concept to a series of hands on tasks to "reduce the concept to practice". This is the difference between being a visionary and being an inventor. Both are important steps in creating so called "disruptive technologies" that open up new markets.

The material can be made from threads as diverse as titanium or the silk of the golden orb spider. Depending on the pattern and composition of the textiles, we can make fabrics that become incredibly tough under impact loads or materials that never develop residual stresses.

We aim to emulate natural tissues that exhibit support and protective functions in novel ways. For example, the periosteum is super-stretchy and soft if you tug on it gently. If you remove the soft sheath from a bone and load that bone until it breaks, it will break at a much lower force without the periosteum. This means that the soft sheath of the periosteum confers super-strength to our relatively hard bones.

The material can be manufactured from any material exhibiting gradients of elasticity and toughness, mimicking elastin and collagen. In fact, the material can be tuned for very specific applications, for example in the medical, transport or sports sectors.

Yes, we have a number of industry partners interested in collaborating and/or licensing our technology.

Definitely! But I can't talk more about that right now. In any case, we aim to reach rather common markets with surprisingly smart textiles.

We are working on a medical project, developing implants that mimic the periosteum, which happens also to be a habitat for stem cells. These are what we call next generation implants that perform multiple functions to promote healing.

We hypothesise that our textiles that naturally harness movement to create pressure gradients will serve well to prevent DVTs.

Right now, our work is set out for us and we will be busy with it for quite some time. However, I always have a number of major projects going on simultaneously and we are gearing up for our first design exhibition.

We were the first to show that stem cells from the periosteum of aged individuals undergoing hip replacements provide a great source of potentially bankable stem cells. Unlike banking of cord blood and perinatal tissues at birth, we aim to find best practices to bank periosteum for regenerative therapies. This would be particularly useful for those born a generation too late to bank their own umbilical cord blood.