Bioengineering at the Nano-Frontier: Advances and Challenges in Smart biomaterials

3D fabrication techniques such as bioprinting and electrospinning present freedom of design and material selection of complex structures. With the emergence of biologically compatible and degradable smart materials, there has been a shift from static constructs to stimuli-responsive constructs. Combining smart materials with 3D fabrication techniques ushered this transformation to 4D fabrication, where the additional dimension is attributed to the function or time. The integration of nanomaterials in stimuli-responsive constructs presents several potentials such as improving existing functionalities as well as introducing new functions to produce anatomically and functionally accurate constructs. This frontier has resulted in many strategies used in drug delivery, biosensors, actuators, medical devices, and beyond.

Applying bioengineering strategies in clinical settings remains a significant challenge that various researchers from science and engineering fields are trying to address. Advances in stimuli-responsive constructs in the field of bioengineering and biotechnology can highlight novel and impactful techniques, specifically applications of stimuli-responsive materials, fabrication strategies using 3D/4D printing and electrospinning, and lastly the use of numerical methods to predict and validate the design and material performance. Highlighting these novelties will be a huge step in advancing healthcare practices to address challenges in global inequalities, finite resources, and disasters in developing countries which limits the quality of available clinical care.

Advances in stimuli-responsive constructs are desirable to improve the quality of care. Therefore, it is important to highlight novel original research papers and review articles on the following topics:

- Stimuli-responsive constructs for implants, scaffolds, sensors, and actuators.
- 3D/4D printing and electrospinning of stimuli-responsive constructs.
- Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for the prediction and validation of Stimuli-responsive construct design and material performance.