ABSTRACT
Current biomaterial research efforts mainly focus on elucidating the specific interaction among material physicochemical properties, proteins/enzymes and various biological molecules, observed cellular functions, and physiological parameters such as mechanical forces in vitro and in vivo (1-10). Based on these investigations, biomaterial developments have begun to utilize the diversity and uniqueness of biology for potential methods to control biological behavior of a myriad of tissue engineering and biomedical applications. As the result of this novel approach and new technology, the field of biomimetic materials emerges. However, the root of biomimetics can be traced to the early 1970s when functional artificial molecules were designed and synthesized by mimicking the functional structure and synthesis pathway of natural compounds. For example, biomimetic methodologies were employed to selectively synthesize antileukemic triptolides (11), cyclical polyenes such as racemic 11α-hydroxyprogesterone (12-14), camptothecin chromophores (15), catechol estrogens (16), polyketone-derived phenols (17), D-glucose-derived ()-biotin (18), and much more. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the field of biomimetics expanded dramatically to such areas as antitumor pharmaceutics (19-21), the development of receptor agonists and antagonists (22,23), the study of functional structures and syntheses of proteins and nucleotides (24), and the elucidation of biological pathways such as enzyme catalysis (25). In the late 1990s and into the new millennium, biomimetic
methodologies have been employed as an engineering tool to develop novel material processing methods such as calcium phosphate coatings on metal alloys (26) and poly(Llactic acid)–co-apatite composites (27), to formulate biofunctional materials for biomedicine and bioengineering such as synthetic peptide amphiphiles (28) and polymers derived from molecular and microbiology (29-31), and to continue to be utilized in probing the molecular fundamentals and mechanisms of biology.
