Issue 32, 2023

Development of a bioactive tunable hyaluronic-protein bioconjugate hydrogel for tissue regenerative applications

Abstract

Every year, there are approximately 500 000 peripheral nerve injury (PNI) procedures due to trauma in the US alone. Autologous and acellular nerve grafts are among current clinical repair options; however, they are limited largely by the high costs associated with donor nerve tissue harvesting and implant processing, respectively. Therefore, there is a clinical need for an off-the-shelf nerve graft that can recapitulate the native microenvironment of the nerve. In our previous work, we created a hydrogel scaffold that incorporates mechanical and biological cues that mimic the peripheral nerve microenvironment using chemically modified hyaluronic acid (HA). However, with our previous work, the degradation profile and cell adhesivity was not ideal for tissue regeneration, in particular, peripheral nerve regeneration. To improve our previous hydrogel, HA was conjugated with fibrinogen using Michael-addition to assist in cell adhesion and hydrogel degradability. The addition of the fibrinogen linker was found to contribute to faster scaffold degradation via active enzymatic breakdown, compared to HA alone. Additionally, cell count and metabolic activity was significantly higher on HA conjugated fibrinogen compared previous hydrogel formulations. This manuscript discusses the various techniques deployed to characterize our new modified HA fibrinogen chemistry physically, mechanically, and biologically. This work addresses the aforementioned concerns by incorporating controllable degradability and increased cell adhesivity while maintaining incorporation of hyaluronic acid, paving the pathway for use in a variety of applications as a multi-purpose tissue engineering platform.

Graphical abstract: Development of a bioactive tunable hyaluronic-protein bioconjugate hydrogel for tissue regenerative applications

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
20 12月 2022
Accepted
05 6月 2023
First published
17 7月 2023

J. Mater. Chem. B, 2023,11, 7663-7674

Development of a bioactive tunable hyaluronic-protein bioconjugate hydrogel for tissue regenerative applications

M. Kasper, M. Cydis, A. Afridi, B. M. Smadi, Y. Li, A. Charlier, B. E. Barnes, J. Hohn, M. J. Cline, W. Carver, M. Matthews, D. Savin, C. M. Rinaldi-Ramos and C. E. Schmidt, J. Mater. Chem. B, 2023, 11, 7663 DOI: 10.1039/D2TB02766F

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements