Scientists develop gel from spider silk proteins for biomedical applications
-
Loading... - Scot Lewis
- 06 Sep 2022
- 63 Views
- 0 Like
- 0 Comment
One of the goals is to develop an injectable protein solution that forms a gel inside the body, which could be used in tissue engineering and for drug release, but also make gels that can streamline chemical processes where enzymes are used. The study is published in Nature Communications.
“We have developed a completely new method for creating a three-dimensional gel from spider silk that can be designed to deliver different functional proteins,” said Anna Rising, research group leader at the Department of Biosciences and Nutrition, Karolinska Institutet and professor at the Department of Anatomy, Physiology and Biochemistry, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.
“The proteins in the gel are very close together and the method is so mild that it can be used even for sensitive proteins.”
Injectable protein
In the future, the researchers hope to develop an injectable protein solution that forms a gel inside the body. The ability to design hydrogels with specific functions opens up for a range of possible applications. Such a gel could, for example, be used to achieve a controlled release of drugs into the body. In the chemical industry, it could be fused to enzymes, a form of proteins used to speed up various chemical processes.
“In the slightly longer term, I think injectable gels can become very useful in regenerative medicine,” said the study’s first author Tina Arndt, PhD student in Rising’s research group at Karolinska Institutet. Read More…
