Elsewhere, researchers are applying similar approaches to soft tissues and organs.
“At UTS, for example, there are a lot of researchers in this space working to better understand cardiac tissue, and how we can use that understanding to improve health outcomes for clients who have cardiac issues,” Brown said. “And some of the work they’re doing includes printing cardiac tissue and vascular tissue.”
One research project currently underway involves stressing cardiac tissue in a controlled environment, which Brown described as “like a heart attack in a lab”.
While many of these technologies remain in the research phase, they could dramatically expand treatment options for patients with complex injuries and organ failure by creating living tissues that more closely replicate the body’s natural function.
“From the tissue engineering perspective, we can look at creating grafts or potentially even whole organs in the future that would significantly increase our capacity to deal with life-threatening organ failure,” Brown said.
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2. Rehabilitation engineering
Brown, whose own work focuses on wheelchair seating and assistive technology for people with spinal cord injuries, said rehabilitation engineering is becoming increasingly collaborative, since many modern approaches combine expertise from engineering, neuroscience and medicine.
That multidisciplinary approach is opening new avenues for treating neurological injuries that have historically had limited therapeutic options.
As create reported in 2024, researchers at UNSW are exploring a novel approach to treating spinal cord injuries and other central nervous system disorders by redesigning how existing drugs are delivered.
Rather than attempting to force medicines across the brain’s protective blood-brain barrier, the team is using gold nanoparticles and naturally occurring transport proteins to carry drugs from muscle tissue back to the brain and spinal cord via the nervous system.
“There’s another project affiliated with Griffith University in Queensland called BioSpine, which is looking at creating multimodal rehabilitation therapies that promote neuron growth and recovery from neurological damage, including spinal cord injury,” Brown said.
These projects are another indicator of the shift towards technologies that not only compensate for lost function, but actively support the body’s repair mechanisms.
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3. AI-enhanced medical devices
According to Brown, AI has significant potential to help engineers design technologies tailored to an individual patient’s physiology and clinical needs.
“An example of that is the use of artificial intelligence in dose guiding for radiotherapy,” he said. “Historically, a nuclear scientist or a radiotherapist would look at a scan and make a determination of where the best places to target the radiotherapy would be in order to get the best outcomes.
“Researchers are now exploring whether artificial intelligence can potentially come up with a dosing guide that is either as good as or better than the radiotherapist, and can do it in a fraction of the time.”
The same advances also support a broader move towards more effective medical devices.
One example is SaiiV, a wearable heart failure monitoring device developed by researchers at Western Sydney University and the University of Sydney.
This technology, profiled by create in 2024, involves a non-invasive sensor that sits on the chest and detects tiny mechanical movements generated by the heart and lungs, providing clinicians with detailed information about cardiac function without the need for invasive procedures.