title: Stepping into the omics era: Opportunities and challenges for biomaterials science and engineering.
abstract: The research paradigm in biomaterials science and engineering is evolving from using low-throughput and iterative experimental designs towards high-throughput experimental designs for materials optimization and the evaluation of materials properties. Computational science plays an important role in this transition. With the emergence of the omics approach in the biomaterials field, referred to as materiomics, high-throughput approaches hold the promise of tackling the complexity of materials and understanding correlations between material properties and their effects on complex biological systems. The intrinsic complexity of biological systems is an important factor that is often oversimplified when characterizing biological responses to materials and establishing property-activity relationships. Indeed, in vitro tests designed to predict in vivo performance of a given biomaterial are largely lacking as we are not able to capture the biological complexity of whole tissues in an in vitro model. In this opinion paper, we explain how we reached our opinion that converging genomics and materiomics into a new field would enable a significant acceleration of the development of new and improved medical devices. The use of computational modeling to correlate high-throughput gene expression profiling with high throughput combinatorial material design strategies would add power to the analysis of biological effects induced by material properties. We believe that this extra layer of complexity on top of high-throughput material experimentation is necessary to tackle the biological complexity and further advance the biomaterials field.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  In this opinion paper, we postulate that converging genomics and materiomics into a new field would enable a significant acceleration of the development of new and improved medical devices. The use of computational modeling to correlate high-throughput gene expression profiling with high throughput combinatorial material design strategies would add power to the analysis of biological effects induced by material properties. We believe that this extra layer of complexity on top of high-throughput material experimentation is necessary to tackle the biological complexity and further advance the biomaterials field.
authors.affiliation: Department of Tissue Regeneration, MIRA Institute for Biomedical Technology and Technical Medicine, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Nathalie
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Groen
authors.affiliation: New Jersey Center for Biomaterials, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
authors.forename: Murat
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Guvendiren
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
authors.forename: Herschel
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Rabitz
authors.affiliation: Department of Pharmacology, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
authors.forename: William J
authors.initials: WJ
authors.lastname: Welsh
authors.affiliation: New Jersey Center for Biomaterials, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA.|Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, New Jersey Center for Biomaterials, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
authors.forename: Joachim
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kohn
authors.affiliation: Department of Tissue Regeneration, MIRA Institute for Biomedical Technology and Technical Medicine, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands.|cBITE Lab, Merln Institute for Technology-Inspired Regenerative Medicine, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: de Boer
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001672:Biocompatible Materials / Q000138:chemical synthesis* / Q000737:chemistry / Q000494:pharmacology; D020650:Combinatorial Chemistry Techniques; D023281:Genomics / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D008422:Materials Testing / Q000379:methods*
chemical_list: D001672:Biocompatible Materials
keywords: Combinatorial screening; Computational modeling; Converging omics fields; Genomics; High-throughput experimentation; Materiomics; Transcriptomics