Thomas Straumann and further third parties, in particular the Swiss National Science Foundation, have financed the Biomaterials Science Center (BMC). Founded in March 2007, the BMC has tackled major medical challenges, including cardiovascular and musculoskeletal diseases, cancer, incontinence and caries.

To this end, an international, multidisciplinary team of physicists, chemists, engineers and medical experts exploit physical principles within a worldwide network of collaborators.

Specific research topics are nanotechnology-based artificial muscles, computational regenerative medicine to evaluate the micro-anatomy of tissues in health and disease, imaging the human tissue down to the individual molecules using hard X-rays, materials and technologies in dentistry, the interface of manmade materials and the biosystem and smart metallic, ceramic and polymer biomaterials with a focus on nanoscience and nanotechnology.