Dr. Karin Hing C-eng, Phd. Bsc, Frms.

Biography

Karin Hing is a senior lecturer in Biomaterials within the School of Engineering and Materials at Queen Mary University of London, prior to this she was an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow within the IRC in Biomedical Materials. She was awarded the Fellowship in 1999, having worked as a post doc after completing her PhD studying the biological response to Bovine derived bone graft substitutes in 1996. As a Post-doc she invented a novel processing route for the manufacture of porous ceramics with a hierarchical porous structure (reflecting the structure of natural trabecular bone). She used this technology to achieve the objective of her advanced research fellowship, which was to develop a fully synthetic ceramic (apatite based) bone graft substitute material (Actifuse) with a pore structure and chemistry optimised to facilitate good quality, rapid bone repair in applications such as spinal fusion, total hip revision and skeletal reconstruction following trauma or disease.  This work formed the underpinning science behind ApaTech Ltd. a QMUL spin-out company that she co-founded with colleagues from the IRC in 2001. Apatech was aquired by Baxter in 2010 for $330m in recongition of its position as a global leader in the provision of their Actifuse based bone graft substitute technologies. Karin's research group is now engaged in the development of next generation bone graft substitution technologies through physico-chemical and hierarchical 3-D structural characterisation of bone grafts, the study of protein interactions, cell response and chemotaxis, to probe the underlying mechanisms behind chemical and structural control of osteoconductive and osteoinductive behaviour in bone graft substitutes.

Research Interest

Bone graft substitute materials, Bone tissue engineering scaffolds, Bioceramics processing, Biomaterials characterisation, Cell response to implant biomaterials, Apatech Ltd