Abstract:

With the rapid development of the economy and society, the requirements of human beings for disease prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis are increasing day by day. In particular, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide has posed a huge threat to human life and health, as well as an extreme impact on the global economy and society. The prosperity of biomaterials and nanotechnology, including but not limited to a variety of micro-/nano-scale biomaterials and a large number of three-dimensional bulk biomaterials, provides new directions and possibilities for solving medical health problems. However, the process with respect to the clinical translation of biomaterials is relatively slow, and currently, only a few biomaterial-based products have received clinical approval.

Benefiting from the advances of materials science and clinical medicine, the interdisciplinary integration of these two disciplines, termed materdicine, starts from the issues and challenges in clinic, rationally designs and synthesizes biomaterials/medmaterials with direct application purposes/needs in order to further effectively address the critical problems in clinical practice. Therefore, materdicine chiefly focuses on clinical medicine issues, satisfies the medical requirements through the corresponding biomaterial-involved platforms and technologies, and further extends to medmaterials that are directly related to clinical medicine including materials systems for medical devices. On the one hand, materdicine concentrates on handling the problems faced by traditional medicine, such as low bioavailability, unsatisfactory therapeutic outcome, poor targeting specificity, and systemic side effects. On the other hand, inorganic, organic, and inorganic/organic hybrid medmaterials own unique physicochemical properties at the micro-/nano-scale and can be developed into multifunctional systems for biomedical imaging and disease therapy. More importantly, theranostics in the field of materdicine elaborately combines diagnostic imaging and therapeutic medicine as complementary technologies to implement imaging-guided treatment and monitoring. Other medical technologies and medmaterials based on the development of materdicine, for instance, tissue engineering materials, biosensing materials, and antibacterial materials, also exhibit considerable potential. Although materdicine has experienced explosive growth in every branch and offered substantial opportunities for disease diagnosis and treatment more securely and effectively, its clinical translation still faces several key challenges, such as the controlled synthesis, large-scale production and toxicity evaluation of medmaterials, in vivo biological barriers, integration of diagnosis and treatment, and clinical translation.

In recent years, Chinese researchers have done a myriad of representative works in the field of rational design and construction, surface functional engineering, optimization and mechanism exploration of physicochemical properties, and biomedical applications of materdicine and medmaterials. To showcase the state-of-the-art research achievements of Chinese scientists in the field of materdicine and stimulate the interest of all walks of life in materdicine and medmaterial, the Editorial Board of the Journal of Inorganic Materials herein invited Prof. CHEN Yu from Shanghai University as guest editor to compile this Special Issue themed “Medmaterials”. This issue contains the latest reviews and research papers related to medical materials, including piezoelectric semiconductor nanomaterials, group VA single- element two-dimensional materials, bioactive ceramics, metal alloys, and silica-based micelles. It is hoped that this special issue will promote the cooperation of researchers and scientists from many fields with different disciplinary backgrounds, and jointly promote the development of the field of materdicine and medmaterial, so as to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of various diseases in clinical medicine for the benefit of human health.