"The body's immune system is an incredibly versatile entity, equally capable of tissue destruction and construction. The potential of harnessing this duality for tissue regeneration is tremendously fascinating and challenging.”

Anthal Smits is Associate Professor of ImmunoRegeneration at the Department of Biomedical Engineeering (section Soft Tissue Engineering & Mechanobiology) and the Insitute for Complex Molecular Systems at Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. He leads the ImmunoRegeneration Group, which specializes in immunomodulation to induce in situ tissue regeneration. The main research goal is to gain a mechanistic understanding of the interactions between human immune cell behavior, biomaterial design, and biomechanical loads, in conditions of health and disease. Smits’ main clinical target applications are cardiovascular replacements (e.g. heart valves and blood vessels), yet, the research is curiosity-driven, and applicable to a wide variety of clinical applications.

Smits' research has an interdisciplinary nature, bridging the fields of tissue engineering, mechanobiology, materials science, and immunology. Topics of investigation range from the fundamentals of patient-specific macrophage-biomaterial interactions using dynamic in vitro platforms, to the development of regenerative scaffolds for heart valve and blood vessel tissue engineering.

Anthal Smits is Associate Professor, leading the ImmunoRegeneration Group at the Department of Biomedical engineering at TU/e. He holds a BSc degree in Mechanical Engineering (2004) and a MSc degree in Biomedical Engineering (2008), both from Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e, The Netherlands). In 2014 he earned his PhD under the supervision of prof. Frank Baaijens, in close collaboration with the University Medical Center Utrecht. After having spent two years working as a Project Engineer at LifeTec Group BV, Smits joined the group of prof. Carlijn Bouten at TU/e as a post-doc in 2015. In July 2016 he was appointed Assistant Professor, at which time he established the ImmunoRegeneration research group, which he is leading to date. In addition to involvements in various international research consortia, he is active in the Materials-Driven Regeneration research program since 2017, as faculty in Flagship 2: in situ tissue engineering (NWO Gravitation). In 2021 he was awarded an ERC Starting Grant for his work on macrophage mechanobiology (ERC MACxercise). In addition, he is part of the DRIVE-RM consortium, led by Prof. Marianne Verhaar and Prof. Calrijn Bouten (NWO Summit). 

He is a core member of the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems (ICMS) at TU/e and a board member of the Netherlands Society for Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering  (NBTE) since 2022. He is a member of the TERMIS EU Chapter and the Heart Valve Society and he has served as board member for the International Conference of Tissue-Engineered Heart Valves (ICTEHV) from 2019-2023. He serves as Editorial Board Member for Tissue Engineering Parts A, B, C, and Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine.