Bioengineering professor Abraham Joy was recently inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering’s College of Fellows.
He started as an organic chemist before moving into creating biomaterials that can be used for procedures such as healing wounds.
But Northeastern University bioengineering professor Abraham Joy also has the mind of an artist.
“Art is when you create things … and there is a real need for designing novel biomaterials,” says Abraham, a recent inductee into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering’s College of Fellows. “I thought the ability to create new materials while addressing a need in the clinic can bring together my backgrounds and the need.”
The chair of Northeastern’s Department of Bioengineering, Joy also leads the university’s Biomaterials Innovation and Translation Lab, which designs synthetic biomaterials for building devices to replace or substitute for diseased or non-functioning tissues.
For example, Joy cites skin — the body’s largest organ.
Clinics currently address skin loss — say, from a burn — through skin grafts from another part of the patient’s body, by using a substitute from a cadaver or with bioengineered skin made from cow or pig tissues.
But Joy says all of these methods have limitations in function and/or cost.
“Someone with a burn on their forearm or their whole arm — they are walking around with hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of grafts,” Joy explains. “So, it’s not that we don’t have the knowledge of what it takes to develop such tissue-engineering products, it’s just that the cost structure of the current products are a large hurdle to their wider use.”
In addition, Joy says the work requires a lot of time and a lot of expert collaborators to meet the physical, mechanical and biological requirements for such products.
So, the lab is designing soft, elastic and fully functional synthetic materials to compete with these traditional methods and which are as similar as possible to natural materials. The materials are currently being tested in diabetic mice.
The lab is a good fit for Northeastern and the university’s emphasis on multidisciplinary learning.
And it makes Joy a good fit for the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.
“It’s a humbling and great honor to be part of AIMBE,” Joy says of his induction. “But it also reminds me of the responsibilities that I am called upon to fill — it’s not just to advance science, but it’s also to advocate for the challenges and the opportunities that the field has.”
“It’s a labor of love to create these kinds of novel materials,” Joy continues. “There is a real need for it — and the thriving Boston scientific ecosystem is the ideal place to bring such ideas to the clinic.”