Bioengineering in women's health: part I

Abstract

This theme issue of Interface Focus is the first of two sets of articles on the topic of bioengineering in women's health. Although there is a long history of collaboration between engineers and medical professionals in orthopaedics and cardiovascular medicine, there has been growing interest in the last decade for interdisciplinary collaborations in other areas of medical science. This growth is particularly true in the case of women's health, a traditionally underserved area of research in the scientific community where fundamental knowledge of female physiology is still needed. Women's health is a broad category encompassing reproduction, fertility, maternal health, normal and abnormal pregnancy and the sequelae associated with a difficult childbirth. Women's health also includes sex-associated pathology associated with cancer, pain, cardiac disease, osteoporosis and other diseases. This list is not exhaustive with new scientific frontiers developing based on the evolving discourse of medicine for all. This first issue in the series focuses on bioengineering advances in the study of the non-pregnant woman, and the articles highlight important developments in pelvic floor disorders, biomedical devices, fertility, breast implant failure and breast cancer. The second issue in the series focuses on pregnancy.

Bioengineering in women's health, volume 2: pregnancy—from implantation to parturition

“…In closing, the rich variety of engineering disciplines, coupled with basic science and clinical collaborators, underscore how multidisciplinary teams tackle the understanding of the intricate biological, chemical and physical processes involved with supporting a healthy pregnancy. These articles, along with those in the previous issue [15] featuring non-pregnant women's health, highlight groundbreaking engineering work in an area which lacks fundamental datasets of pregnant female physiology, and they offer quantitative frameworks to move maternal and fetal health forward. As a field, engineering-and bioengineering in particularbrings tools and techniques, both experimental and computational, to a wide range of problems in biology and biomedicine.…”

Supramolecular fibrous hydrogel augmentation of uterosacral ligament suspension for treatment of pelvic organ prolapse

“…To address the substantial gaps in medical knowledge, researchers have leveraged tissue engineering approaches to transform our understanding of ovarian follicle development, [4,5] endometriosis, [6] gynecological cancers, [7] and other disorders of the endometrium. [8] In addition, special journal issues focusing on engineering for women's health [9][10][11] and indepth review articles [12,13] have increased visibility for this body of work. However, there is still much to be done to address the urgent clinical need to develop and investigate translational therapies.…”

Supramolecular Fibrous Hydrogel Augmentation of Uterosacral Ligament Suspension for Treatment of Pelvic Organ Prolapse

“…To address the substantial gaps in medical knowledge, researchers have leveraged tissue engineering approaches to transform our understanding of ovarian follicle development, [13,14] endometriosis, [15] gynecological cancers, [16] and other disorders of the endometrium. [17] In addition, special journal issues focusing on engineering for women's health [18][19][20] and in-depth review articles [21,22] have increased visibility for this body of work. However, improving the quality of women's health research cannot be done without increasing government funding for female-specific disorders or developing research methods that are specifically designed for women.…”