Advances in Acoustic Bioassembly

A core strand of research in the Armstrong Group is the development of new bioengineering technologies that can provide control over the assembly of biomaterials, tissues and organoids. We are particularly interested in the use of ultrasound fields to provide contactless manipulation and assembly of biomaterials and living cells (e.g., Advanced Materials 2018, Advanced Materials 2020, Advanced Healthcare Materials 2022, Advanced Healthcare Materials 2025). In this talk, I will focus on a technology that we have pioneered that uses ultrasound standing waves to rapidly and remotely pattern living cell populations into tunable geometric arrays. I will explore how we have designed acoustic devices to fabricate biomaterials with organized cytoarchitecture that can be engineered into various anisotropic tissue constructs (e.g., skeletal muscle, cartilage, cardiac tissue). I will conclude the talk with our future perspectives on the field and share our ongoing work in developing next-generation ultrasound technologies to enable high precision and high selectivity acoustic bioassembly.

Dr James Armstrong is Associate Professor of Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering, working at Bristol Medical School in the University of Bristol. He leads a highly renowned research group that is pioneering biotechnologies, biomaterials, and biofabrication methods for in vitro tissue modelling and regenerative medicine (www.TheArmstrongGroup.co.uk). He has contributed to >£7M of successful grant bids, including 13 years of consecutive fellowship awards from Arthritis Research UK (2015-2018), the Medical Research Council (2018-2021), and a prestigious UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (2021-2028). His research output includes 53 peer-reviewed papers that feature prominently in leading journals (e.g., Advanced Materials, Nature Communications, Science Advances) and he has a h-index of 28 and ~4500 citations. He is co-inventor on four patents and, in 2023, co-founded Impulsonics, an award-winning biotechnology spin-out company. He is editorial board member of the leading journal Biofabrication and an elected committee member for the UK Tissue & Cell Engineering Society.