 Diabetes, obesity, and old age all lead to an inability to heal wounds, creating what is known as the silent epidemic. This is because survival is fundamentally linked to the ability to heal damage to our skin. By creating a formidable barrier, it keeps us safe from infections that would otherwise be fatal. Globally, non-healing ulcers on diabetic feet lead to an amputation every 30 seconds and carry with them lower five-year survival rates than breast and prostate cancer. With the number of diabetics predicted to increase over 50% to 640 million in the next 20 years, this is a rapidly growing global epidemic. The cost of treating these ulcers is staggering. $17 billion is spent in the U.S. alone equal to the direct health care spending on breast cancer. In other countries, treating a single ulcer can consume the equivalent of six years of personal income. Rather than treating complications, this money is better spent on preventing and curing disease. Despite diabetes consuming over 800 billion international dollars and diabetics with ulcers being twice as expensive to treat, attempts over the past 20 years to develop drugs to heal these wounds has produced a graveyard of failure. This is because healing our wounds is one of the most complex biological processes that our bodies must perform. Following wounding, different cells work together over time in a coordinated fashion to heal the damage, similar to musicians in an orchestra. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that a therapeutic strategy targeting only one of the many defects in this complex process will be successful at promoting healing. But is it possible to design a therapy that works like a conductor in the orchestra, instructing multiple players on when, where, and what they need to do? My research group at Imperial College London is answering this question by developing dynamic biomaterials that rewire the process of wound repair over time. Historically, materials have largely been passive players in tissue repair. They serve as band-aids or supportive scaffolds such as collagen, but lack the ability to actively direct repair. But tissues are fundamentally dynamic. They respond to changes in their environment. This means that therapeutic materials need to seamlessly interact with tissues over time. My approach combines aspects of material science, DNA nanotechnology, self-assembly, and additive manufacturing to develop materials that coordinate biological activity. This allows the creation of materials that work like a conductor, actively synchronizing the process of repair. For instance, my materials aim to concentrate key therapeutic molecules found within the body, subsequently activating them at various stages during repair. In addition, they deliver therapeutics that rewire how cells interpret instructions, making them more likely to heal. This is a fundamentally different approach to treatment. It recognizes that the process of wound repair has inherent spatial and temporal dynamics that are critical to successful healing. But it also relies on understanding what the key barriers to healing are at each time point during the process of repair. To identify these barriers, it takes diverse expertise. I am working with clinicians to identify the local biological defects within diabetic ulcers that prevent them from healing. I am also working with biologists to understand how natural biological variation between individuals gives rise to differing ability to heal wounds. These insights are then combined to program specific therapeutic combinations and sequences into my materials. These materials can be applied like a bandaid, but unlike a bandaid, they orchestrate the process of wound repair as it progresses over time. But these materials are only part of the story. The same biological insights used to program my materials may also identify the patients who are most likely to develop chronic non-healing wounds. This may provide the opportunity to develop personalized comprehensive treatment programs that drive efficient healing. But these materials are only useful if they reach the market. Therefore, I have recently started establishing industrial collaborations to drive these innovations to market, where they have the potential to treat a variety of damaged issues throughout the body, not just diabetic ulcers. But the path to market is still an uphill climb. There are currently no approved combination therapies available for treating wounds, despite non-healing wounds having lower survival rates than several cancers. So, I leave you with a question. How many limbs and lives do we need to lose before we make a concerted effort to push revolutionary wound care technologies to market? Thank you.