Biomedical technologies and devices: second edition

Several books and handbooks devoted to biomaterials have been published during the past years. Some are devoted to the field in general; some others are more specific and deal with materials (metals, ceramics, polymers, etc.) or applications (drug delivery, tissue engineering, etc.). From a general viewpoint, the field lacks books aimed at introducing the problems and limits related to fundamental biology and effective therapeutic clinical applications. Biomaterial science is a domain in which specialists of various sciences have to work together with the aim of targeting, sooner or later after stepwise approaches, an effective application for the benefit of human health. Therefore, taking into account the last stages of such interdisciplinary strategies that depend on medicine, biology, and on the complexity of the human body is essential. This is not always the case in most of the published contributions. For instance, sterilization is important for effective application and development of many new therapeutic systems and devices. In the field of polymeric biomaterials, sterilization is seldom addressed despite the fact that processes can be aggressive and destructive and thus can ruin several years of work if their potential deleterious actions are ignored. The handbook edited by J.E. Moore and D.J. Duncan appears of great interest because it tackles primarily diversified topics that can be the source of profitable information to contributors who were not trained in biology and medicine. The book is composed of 30 chapters, which treat 30 different topics in slightly more than 700 pages. Although this handbook was made to sensitize clinicians to novel technologies, specialists of polymeric biomaterials will find matter of interest to complement and enrich their perception of clinical problems, of present solutions and, importantly, of related challenges. Particularly, chapters treating imaging, drug delivery, tissue engineering, gene therapy, biological assays, and histology and staining should be profitable to researchers as well as to undergraduate and graduate students in polymeric biomaterials engineering.