Engineering Scaffold Surface Shapes To Reduce Need For Drugs

• The 2026 edition of our AMA: Energy online conference returns on April 30th. Register now! The Academy of Medical Sciences has awarded Dr. Robert Owen, a researcher at the University of Nottingham’s School of Pharmacy, a grant to study how physical surface geometry influences cell behavior, with the goal of building those cues directly into healthcare materials.…

The 2026 edition of our AMA: Energy online conference returns on April 30th. Register now! The Academy of Medical Sciences has awarded Dr. Robert Owen, a researcher at the University of Nottingham’s School of Pharmacy, a grant to study how physical surface geometry influences cell behavior, with the goal of building those cues directly into healthcare materials. The grant is part of a £6.7 million tranche the Academy distributed across 55 early career researchers at 38 UK institutions through its Springboard program. Owen’s project uses ultra-high-resolution 3D printing to build materials with precisely engineered surface features, such as microscale curves, and then observe how cells involved in bone healing and skin repair respond to them. The research tracks how those cells move, cha