Bioinspired concepts are becoming increasingly integrated into materials and devices intended for medical applications. Biological organisms evolve within specific environmental constraints, giving rise to elegant and efficient strategies for fabricating materials that often outperform
man-made materials of similar composition. A main goal of the interdisciplinary field of bioinspired materials is to unlock the secrets of this process--the composition, processing, self-assembly, hierarchical organization, and properties of biological materials--and use this information to
synthesize and engineer novel functional materials for a variety of practical applications.

The authors are from a variety of scientific disciplines, including biology, biochemistry, chemistry, physics, materials science, mechanical engineering, and bioengineering. This book will appeal to readers interested in the cross-disciplinary fertilization of new ideas in this emerging field. The
first volume of this book includes sections focused on the bioinspired approaches using biological macromolecules including poly(nucleic acids), polypeptides, and the derivatives. Both volumes cover the interdisciplinary fields of biological, synthetic, and the hybrid materials and describe their
medical applications ranging from molecular to cellular levels.

About the Author:
Yoshihiro Ito is Chief Scientist and Director of the Nano Medical Engineering Laboratory at RIKEN (from 2004) and Team Leader of Emergent Bioengineering Materials Research Team at RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (from 2013). He received his doctorate in engineering from Kyoto University in
1987. Since then he has held posts at institutions including assistant and associate professor at Kyoto University, professor of the University of Tokushima, and Project Leader at the Kanagawa Academy of Science and Technology. He has published more than 600 scientific articles.

Xuesi Chen is a professor at Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Leader of Biomedical Polymer Materials Group. He received his Ph.D. degree at Waseda University, Japan, in 1997, and completed his post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, USA,
in 1999. He has published over 600 articles in academic journals, which have been cited more than 10000 times until now. In addition, he has applied over 250 Chinese patents and more than 120 have been authorized.

Inn-Kyu Kang is a professor in the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering at Kyungpook National University (KNU) in South Korea. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Polymer Chemistry at Kyoto University in 1987, and joined in the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering of KNU in 1988 as a
professor. He has published more than 220 articles and his research is focused on nanofiber scaffolds, nanoparticles, and liquid crystal biosensors.