By Prof Abhay Pandit, as published in the Royal Irish Academy Members’ Research Series
January 22nd, 2026:
I have spent the better part of three decades working on biomaterials for tissue engineering – a field that asks a deceptively simple question: when we put a material into the body to help repair damaged tissue, how do we stop the immune system from attacking it? The body is exquisitely sensitive to anything foreign. Put in a splinter, and within hours the area becomes red, swollen and painful as the immune system springs into action. This truly remarkable and wonderful process evolved to protect us from infection and foreign invaders. Without it, none of us would survive.
The only problem is, this same protective response can work against us when we’re trying to use biomaterials to help repair tissues. The body sees the implanted material as foreign and launches an inflammatory attack. This can lead to the material being walled off by scar tissue, or rejected entirely. For decades, this has been one of the central challenges in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.
This is where the concept of immunomodulation comes in – essentially teaching materials to communicate with the immune system in ways that promote healing rather than rejection. My lab has focused particularly on a strategy called glyco-functionalisation. We’re one of the few groups that gets inspiration from human pathological signals from stratified patients to design therapeutic biomaterials. Our hypothesis is that glycosignatures – the specific patterns of glycans on cell surfaces – change with disease states, and we need to be aware of this when designing our materials. We start by studying what’s actually going wrong in patients with specific diseases, stratifying them based on their inflammatory profiles and identifying how their glycosignatures have changed. Then we design biomaterials that can modulate those sugar patterns and counteract the pathological signals.
By decorating biomaterials with specific glycans, we can influence how the immune system responds. Certain glycan structures can tell immune cells to stand down. Others actively recruit cells that promote tissue repair rather than inflammation. It’s like giving the biomaterial the right passport to enter the body without triggering alarm bells.Professor Abhay Pandit MRIA
What makes this challenge complex is that, after implantation, virtually all cell types can become immune-activated. Fibroblasts can start pumping out inflammatory signals. Dendritic cells present foreign material to T cells, triggering immune responses. Neutrophils release destructive enzymes. The entire local cellular community can shift into an inflammatory state that works against our regenerative goals.
We’re developing glyco-functionalised materials for applications where controlling inflammation is critical. In stroke, we’re working on biomaterials that can dampen destructive inflammation while promoting brain tissue repair. In disc degeneration, we’re developing materials that can regenerate disc tissue without triggering inflammation. We’re also working on better implants – joint replacements, surgical meshes, cardiovascular devices – with glycan coatings that prevent foreign body responses.
We have several irons in the fire and hope to see progress in creating biomaterials that the body actively works with to repair damaged tissues. We are a curiosity-driven discovery lab, but we want to generate real-world solutions that make a difference to patients’ lives. Given the innovative approaches being taken by labs worldwide, hope remains high that these challenges will one day be overcome.
ENDS
