Someday, Antoni Tomsia's research could help people live full lives even as their bones weaken. The Berkeley Lab scientist recently received a $4.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop bone-like materials that could greatly improve implants such as artificial hips and shoulders.

	Antoni Tomsia's pursuit of better biomaterials blurs the boundaries between several scientific disciplines.

Tomsia's goal is to harness the latest advances in nanotechnology to fabricate implants that repair themselves, adapt to changing physiological conditions, and mesh with surrounding tissue -- in other words, behave like real bone. In contrast, today's artificial joints are made from metal alloys that often trigger inflammation and immune responses, or require corrective surgery after only a few years.

The need for better biomaterials is further underscored by the growing demand for artificial joints. More than 150,000 hip replacement and nearly 300,000 knee replacements were performed in 2000, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. These numbers are expected to swell in the future as baby boomers age.

To meet these demands and create the next generation of artificial joints, Tomsia has assembled a multidisciplinary team of scientists from Berkeley Lab, the University of California's Berkeley and San Francisco campuses, and Bothell, Washington-based SkeleTech, Inc.

"We're at the interface of chemistry, biology, materials science, and medicine," says Tomsia, a 25-year veteran of Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division who arrived from Poland as a postdoc in 1978. "Teamwork is absolutely necessary to design better implants."

The collaboration will explore ways to make scaffolding, a fundamental building block in tissue engineering that provides a platform on which healthy cells can inhabit and proliferate. This material, when thinly coated onto an implant, facilitates the all-important bond between the implant and surrounding tissue. Over time, as more and more cells inhabit the scaffolding, the implant becomes as enmeshed into the body as any bone.

But as important as scaffolding is to an implant's success, researchers haven't been able to fabricate material that both mimics bone's strength and porosity, and is readily accepted by the body's immune system. To meld these conflicting characteristics into a single biomaterial, Tomsia is pursuing two research initiatives. Both take advantage of bone's relatively simple composition of calcium phosphate and collagen.

"Our material will have properties exactly like bone," Tomsia says. "It will absorb stress, and it won't cause immune responses and inflammation."

Tomorrow's strong, long-lasting artificial joints could rely on scaffolding with a dense core and increasingly greater porosity toward the surface.

The first approach relies on a calcium phosphate mineral called hydroxyapatite. Using nanosized particles of this mineral, Tomsia's group has developed scaffolding that features a dense inner core with gradually increasing porosity toward the surface, like a cylindrical sponge with tiny holes near the center, and increasingly larger holes toward the exterior. This combination gives the scaffolding strength without sacrificing porosity.

To make the scaffolding even stronger, they infiltrate its layers with different polymers, with each successively deeper polymer layer less inclined to accept the influx of cells. When a scaffolding-coated implant is inserted into the body, bone cells incrementally invade the scaffolding -- first occupying the outer layer, then the next layer, and the next -- until the implant slowly becomes a part of the body.

The scaffolding is fabricated using stereolithography, a technique in which a three-dimensional object is poured layer by layer using liquid polymer and a computer-generated design. Tomsia's laboratory has also developed a fabrication technique that uses liquid nitrogen to freeze cast calcium phosphate suspensions into the desired shape and porosity.

The second approach takes its cue from collagen, a fibrous protein substance that, along with calcium phosphate, is the main constituent of bone. Instead of using collagen, however, Tomsia is developing scaffolding from hydrogel, an organic polymer that closely mirrors the chemical properties of collagen. Like collagen, the polymer provides a staging ground for calcium phosphate to coalesce and begin building bone. Hydrogel scaffolding can also be applied in minute quantities, enabling it to foster the growth of bone tissue a few cells at a time. This nanoscale, targeted approach could help speed the recovery of bone fractures, or ensure that implants bind with surrounding tissue.

Is it real, or is it hydroxyapatite? Synthetic tissue that looks and behaves like the real thing comes alive in this artist's impression of next-generation scaffolding.

Tomsia's career has steadily trended toward the development of more life-like biomaterials. After following his father's footsteps into materials science, his Berkeley Lab research has focused on exploring the interface between metals and ceramics. His foray into hydroxyapatite and hydrogel-based materials began several years ago, when he designed coatings for industrial applications as part of DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences-funded research. Now, the NIH bioengineering research partnership grant allows Tomsia and his team to more thoroughly investigate the biological attributes of these substances.

The grant also enables Tomsia's group to acquire an environmental field emissions scanning electron microscope, a fancy name for a microscope that allows researchers to view wet, and therefore biologically realistic, samples. In contrast, some high-resolution microscopes can only analyze dry samples, a drawback that prohibits researchers from analyzing samples in their natural environment. Tomsia will use the microscope to conduct the next phase of his research: scaffolding that passes mechanical property screening tests will be immersed in cell cultures that reveal precisely how live bone cells interact with the scaffolding.

Artificial knees could become less artificial thanks to Tomsia's research.

Ultimately, Tomsia hopes to develop biomaterials that replicate the strength, porosity, and elasticity of real bone. The latter trait may lead to longer lasting implants. Because today's implants are too stiff, they shield adjacent bones from the stresses of everyday life, such as the jarring bounce of walking. Unfortunately, bones don't grow unless they are stressed (which is why astronauts lose bone mass). In the case of implants, stress-shielding inhibits the continuous growth of new cells that keep joints healthy and strong, which, in turn, causes implants to loosen over time and require corrective surgery -- a fate that befell 59,000 hip and knee replacements in 2000. Tomsia's research could greatly reduce the number of these surgeries each year.

"I'm very interested in improving people's lives," Tomsia says.

In addition to the multi-institution group convened under the NIH grant, Tomsia will continue to receive assistance from several Materials Sciences Division researchers, including Jie Song and Eduardo Saiz, and scientists from Carolyn Bertozzi's and Rob Ritchie's research groups.

"We don't have Leonardo da Vincis anymore. Nobody can do this alone -- we have to work together," Tomsia says.

Additional information

• Tomsia and his colleagues' previous research on artificial joint materials
• Previous research on metal-ceramic bonding