Molecular design of polymers for biomedical applications
MEDIPOL (“Molecular Design of Polymers for Biomedical Applications”) is an interdisciplinary, international and intersectoral collaborative effort that utilises the mechanism of personnel exchange between partners located in the EU and Asia to address key aspects of problems of huge international socioeconomic importance. Through carefully planned and integrated secondments MEDIPOL will use knowledge transfer to train 29 ESRs and 20 ERs to be future leaders in both academia and industry. The specific major problems that we shall tackle affect vision and mobility, which are becoming increasingly critical issues in healthcare systems across the world, where the growing socio-economic difficulties of ageing populations are evident at both individual and governmental levels. MEDIPOL is designed to identify, design, develop and disseminate understanding of materials and technologies for systems that will aid and augment the healthy ageing of ocular and dermal tissue. Key to achieving this lies in harnessing the understanding of the moist ocular surface and its relevance to compromised dermal tissue. There are clear links between ocular and dermal sites. Importantly, understanding these analogies facilitates the design of contact lenses especially for use as corneal bandages, of ophthalmic dry eye therapies and of successful burn and wound dressings. These issues are international, they affect quality of life and they are of very significant social and economic importance in both developing and developed economies.

MEDIPOL is an integrated 4-year program of knowledge transfer and networking between Aston University, UK (Aston), i+Med S. Coop, Spain (i+Med), Technical University of Liberec, Czech republic (TUL), Chiang Mai University, Thailand (CMU), Naresuan University, Thailand (NU) and Mae Fah Luang, Thailand (MFU). The overarching objective of the proposed joint exchange programme is to establish long-term stable research cooperation between all partners.