A return to my multivalent roots

Here's a project I did this week for a company in the UK. They attach growth factors to a flexible and biologically compatibe backbone to improve efficiency and bioactivity. I spent most of my postdoc thinking about multivalency so it was neat for me to see this technology put to use to dramatically (by orders of magnitude) reduce the numbers of growth factors necessary to do the same job - just by stringing them together.

For most projects I rely almost entirely on Adobe Illustrator, but this one called for some Photoshop, which allowed me a self-refresher in the methods I learned in that segment of my digital design certificate program. To make the red growth factors look like are are really embedded into the orange receptors, I used the same techniques that magazines use to remove pimples, wrinkles, and dimples (not the good kind) from celebrities. So I guess I've got that to fall back on.