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11 July 2025
Bioengineering | Interview with One of the Authors—Dr. Karuna Nambi Gowri
The following is an interview with Dr. Karuna Nambi Gowri:
1. Can you tell us a bit about your background and what your research focuses on?
My basic major is textile technology with a focus on textile and materials chemistry. During my PhD, I looked at different bioresorbable polymeric materials that could be used as absorbable sutures, and so my research focus is completely on the realm of sustainable biomaterials used for different applications, ranging from traditional textile finishes and biomedical textiles to, currently, non-woven and paper manufacturing.
2. What made you decide to publish a bioengineering article? Why did you choose MDPI’s Bioengineering journal?
I was involved in the realm of biomedical textile research and looking at different polymeric biomaterials that can be engineered and fabricated into innovative wound closure devices, barbed or knotless sutures. Since my research focus was to engineer polymeric biomaterials into these barbed sutures, we anticipated that Bioengineering would be a good place to get our review manuscript published. And this is the main reason we resorted to publishing it in the Bioengineering journal. The other reason why we chose to publish this journal is because of the wide scope of the journal itself.
3. Was it important to you that the journal is open access? How does open access publishing advance the field of bioengineering?
It was important to publish this article in an open access journal since we wanted this to be a baseline for future researchers who like to work on barbed sutures. If it is an open access manuscript, then it would be beneficial to them to actually review it and progress their research from there instead of going through a whole lot of research done over two decades. And open access publishing actually helps advance this field of bioengineering by creating more visibility of the work that was done previously, which would be a win-win situation for both the authors of the article and also the readers who read the article.
4. What do you hope that readers will get from your paper?
We looked through the literature to identify different barbed sutures and their properties that were already published and available for review and evaluation. But there weren’t many review manuscripts for barbed sutures from a material standpoint and there were review articles from clinical standpoints. And so our hope was that this would be a good collection of all the previous works that have been done and published in the area of barbed sutures, and that this manuscript would give a broad overview of how research on barbed sutures was and how it is expected to improve in the future.
5. What critical scientific or engineering problems did your research initially aim to address?
The critical scientific problem that we wanted to address in this research on barbed sutures was to see if we could make the fabrication of these barbed sutures more efficient and commercially scalable with easy manipulation of the barb geometries and parameters. So, in order to address this issue, we looked at switching the currently existing mechanical fabrication to a laser fabrication technique which would enable us to manipulate the barb geometries and parameters in a faster and more precise way, making it suitable for use in a lot more complicated surgical procedure.
6. What are the current bottlenecks in this field, and how did you identify your research’s breakthrough point?
The current bottleneck in the fabrication of barbed sutures is that all the commercially available barbed sutures have the same barb parameters irrespective of the surgery they are to be used in. However, from the literature and previous research studies, it can be seen that different surgical procedures require different barb parameters, since different procedures involve different tissue compositions and structures. So, our research aim was to identify alternative fabrication techniques to better manipulate the barb parameters, considering the final surgical procedure they could be used in. The breakthrough was that we were able to prove that an ultrashort pulsed laser system can be used to fabricate barbed sutures with customized barb parameters that are needed for their use for different surgical procedures.
7. Why do you think this article has been highly cited?
I think the reason for the high citation of this article is because this review manuscript is a collection of all the previous work that focuses on barbed sutures, inclusive of both patents and manuscripts. I guess it is easier for all future researchers who are willing to work in this area of barbed sutures, this article is like a compiled manuscript which has details from research done for over two decades in this area of biomedical textiles.