Fellowship success

We are delighted to announce that Dr Robert Owen and Dr Simon Attwood won the prestigious Nottingham Research Fellowships 2023.  The three-year competitively awarded research fellowships are aimed at outstanding postdoctoral researchers who are at the early stage of their academic careers from all academic disciplines represented at the university.

Rob’s fellowships, 'Harnessing Geometry’, will research how we can harness our ability to control cells with geometry within clinically translatable medical devices manufactured by additive manufacturing, focussing initially on bone repair.

Within my fellowship I will develop an additively manufactured screening platform that can be used to identify cell-scale geometries that promote specific cellular responses and use next generation sequencing to understand the underlying biological mechanisms. I will then design medical materials and devices based on these, such as bone graft substitutes, that are manufactured from tessellations of these therapeutic geometries. This approach has the opportunity to overcome the limitations associated with relying on powerful biological molecules to control cell responses that are acting as a barrier to widespread clinical use of tissue engineering strategies. 

Simon's fellowship will be on 3D printed desktop reactors for rapid, responsive and sustainable manufacture of medicines.

Medicines manufacture is currently a slow process which breaks down with sudden surges in patient demand, or if supply chains are delayed or stopped. We have seen worldwide shortages of anti-COVID drugs in 2020, approximately 100-200 drug shortages every year in the US, and in the UK this has been described as a ‘crisis in the supply of medicines’.

I have developed a 3D printed reactor core, with exceptionally high resolution capable of synthesising small organic molecules with greatly improved efficiency. The Nottingham Research Fellowship will allow me to develop this core technology into a fully functioning system, capable of synthesising medicines on demand for patients at desktop scale with supply chain resilience.

I will use multi-material and functional 3D printing to develop process-plant-style, desktop-scale, microfluidic modules including synthesis, separation and co-factor recycling units for the biocatalytic synthesis of a pharmaceutical medicine and commercially important precursors.

High resolution 3D printed reactor core for synthesising small organic molecules.
Reactants flow into the structure where entrapped enzymes catalyse their reaction into useful product molecules. Projection Micro-Stereolithography (PμSL) was used to create the functional hydrogel. Cube is 2x2x2 mm, with horizontal channels of 150 µm width. Channels as small as 10 µm are possible.