Silk Sponges to Help the Soft Tissues in the Body Heal
Soft tissue loss and damage associated with trauma and disease present a significant healthcare burden worldwide. These are often complex wounds with damage to a number of tissue types, including muscle, skin, and neural tissues, and require biomaterial platforms with highly tunable physical features to accommodate the complex tissue defect. Silk protein has emerged as a promising and versatile natural polymer for the development of biomaterial systems, and regenerated silk is a cell-compatible, biodegradable protein that can be engineered into a range of material formats, including porous scaffolds and sponges, hydrogels, films, fibers, and microspheres. Researchers from Tufts University have developed silk sponges that act as a placeholder while the body heals itself, eventually degrading away when the tissue can hold together on its own. The team has created a process that allows the sponges to last as long as needed.
Transcript
00:00:00 it's a new frontier in healthcare regenerative medicine helping the body regrow tissue bone skin and even organs one team of researchers has developed materials using ordinary silk that can be programmed to help the body [Music] heal David Kaplan and his team at tus University in Massachusetts jumped head first into the fast growing world of
00:00:24 regenerative medicine research Kaplan published his most recent breakthrough in the journal ACS biomaterial science and Eng ering Kaplan used silk proteins to create a kind of three-dimensional scaffolding doctors can use to help soft tissue regrow inside the body these silk sponges work much like construction scaffolding that holds materials and workers while a building is being built
00:00:44 they act as a placeholder while the body heals itself eventually degrading away when the tissue can hold together on its own so if you do your job right uh you have basically the restoration of full normal tissue when you're done the challenge Kaplan says is programming the sponges to dissolve at the right pace and work with the real tissue inside the body how do you put all put all that
00:01:05 together have it function the right way degrade away in the right lifetime while the cells take over and Remodel and reform native tissue Kaplan says his team has created a process that allows the sponges to last as long as needed we could design them to dissolve away almost immediately if we want which has meaning very low or no crystallinity to Lasting literally 2 to 3 years because
00:01:28 the sponges are made of silk the body's immune system doesn't attack them aggressively it's fairly quiet in the body so there's reactions to it but it's fairly low in terms of inflammation and by the time the sponge is no longer needed it's harmlessly decayed when you're all done it essentially disappears it turns into amino acids which are the normal content of your
00:01:49 Matrix and cells in the body anyway although Kaplan and his team are focused on soft tissue now he wants to continue Research into complex sponges that could one day help replace or heal entire organ and that's where more complex Printing and other methods will come in so you can really sort of create multimodal tissues you know get to you know get to a kidney get to a heart get
00:02:10 to um a lung all these complex tissues that's really the next uh sphere we're after ACS headline science is produced by the American Chemical Society for more on the latest top chemistry research from ACS Publications why not subscribe to ACS h