Skin loss through non-fatal burns and ulcers are a leading cause of morbidity, including prolonged hospitalization. It is often poorly managed, requiring the frequent changing of single-use wound dressings. This generates a significant amount of contaminated waste globally that is either incinerated or disposed of in landfill. The complexity of burn and chronic skin ulceration wound healing, compared to other skin injuries, requires the development of sustainable and advanced regenerative wound dressings. This proposal aims to develop a biodegradable 3D bioprinted hydrogel wound dressing. This device will encapsulate immortalized foetal keratinocytes and fibroblasts or their extracted secretome. The secretome can accelerate wound healing by inducing the stimulation of skin stem cells. The wound dressing will provide controlled therapeutic levels of biomolecule delivery, protection from wound-secreted proteases, and an external abrasions safeguard. The device will employ engineered biodegradable and compostable biomaterials, contributing to the transition from a major waste stream to a sustainable alternative wound healing device.

The Terahertz (THz) frequency domain has a myriad of anticipated applications such as wireless THz communications, security screening, and bio-chemical sensing. More specifically, bio-chemical sensors operating in the THz spectral region (1-20 THz) are becoming increasingly valuable, as the vibrational transitions of molecules are two to three orders of magnitude stronger in the THz spectral domain than in the visible counterpart, leaving distinctive spectral fingerprints that are very convenient for sensing. The paramount issue to be solved in order to enable these applications is the lack of a THz detector that is altogether fast, sensitive, compact and operating at room temperature. The proposal TIGER aims at creating a new generation of THz optomechanical CMOS-compatible detectors with integrated germanium nanolasers. The substantial originality of our proposal lies in the convergence of the two significant research fields, THz optomechanical metamaterial system and mechanically-engineered silicon photonics, that has never envisioned before for the technologically important THz frequency range. Our device benefits from 3 different physical domains: (1) metamaterial, (2) optomechanics, and (3) laser physics. In our structure, a metamaterial resonator receives THz radiation and confines a strong electromagnetic field into an ultra-sub-wavelength scale, which leads to a mechanical vibration within a pre-stressed germanium photonic crystal nanobeam laser. The mechanical action induces strong changes in the output characteristics of germanium laser (e.g. peak wavelength position, amplitudes), which, in turn, provide detailed information on the incoming THz radiation. The output of germanium laser can also be fed into integrated photodetectors that give rise to electrical signals. As the mechanical element is typically of nanometer dimensions, its frequency response is in the MHz range, thus much faster than any existing THz detectors operating at room temperature. Furthermore, the germanium devices are fully compatible with silicon-based technology; our THz detectors can be naturally integrated in CMOS platforms, leading to compact THz sensing devices.