For this project, Dipole Materials is developing thinner-than-hair fiber mats of biological materials, or ‘BioPapers™’, for drug design, tissue engineering, and 3D bioprinting in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.

MIPS Project Challenge:
The goals of this MIPS project are to provide product feedback on BioPaper™, perform optimization studies for storage, design product user guides, and assess cell performance.

Project Scope:
Through this MIPS project, researchers will perform product tests on the alpha prototype of DiPole’s BioPapers™ and will provide the company’s first customer feedback on ease-of-use in the lab environment. This testing will provide critical feedback on the alpha prototype to inform beta prototype development, especially in ease-of-use, as well as possible alternatives for storage. The PI’s work will also provide critical information necessary to distribute to customers, including BioPaper™ storage, product shelf-life, and product compatibility, as well as use with specific cell types in order to use BioPapers™ in tissue engineering.

Synthetic, electrospun materials require the introduction of biologic material, similar to DiPole’s BioPapers, in order to promote cell attachment. Hydrogels lack control of scaffold properties or architecture, which may be needed to promote specific cell behavior. Tissue culture plastic does not support cell attachment for all adherent cell types, and does not recapitulate proper cell-matrix interactions similar to what is found in the body. BioPapers has distinct advantages, given its ability to support cell attachment, control fiber size, porosity, and mechanical properties, and use with many cell types. DiPole plans to be the first company providing ‘BioPapers’ as electrospun scaffolds composed of biologically-derived materials.