Yasaman Delaviz and Meghan Wright, two PhD candidates in the Santerre Lab, travelled to Minneapolis, Minnesota to take part in the Society for Biomaterials (SFB) annual conference last week. Yasaman presented her exciting work on the mechanical properties of her novel dental adhesives (see session abstracts here), while Meghan presented her recent data on the use of a perfusion bioreactor for generating engineered vasculature in D-PHI scaffolds (here). Meghan also presented her abstract co-authored with Yasaman on using ciprofloxacin-conjugated monomers in D-PHI for anti-infective tissue engineering of the gingival tissues (here).

Minneapolis is a hub of the medical device industry in the US, and the SFB meeting reflected this by inviting Medtronic Senior Director of Business Development Ryan Egeland to give the keynote address. Medtronic is the world's largest medical device development company, and the operational headquarters are located in Minneapolis. The conference also featured a series of sessions on medical device commercialization, entitled "Benchtop to Bedside: We'll Get You There!", where topics such as first-in-man clinical studies, sterilization techniques, and FDA regulatory pathways were discussed.

The meeting was a place for students, scientists, educators, and industry representatives to meet on common ground and nurture our passion for biomaterials and medical device innovation.