Mar 04, 2019 |
Plasma protein may hold promise for wound scaffolds
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(Nanowerk News) Researchers in Germany have employed a plasma protein found in blood to develop a new method for making wound-healing tissue scaffolds.
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The team's new scaffold can be attached or detached from a surface, for either in vitro laboratory tissue studies or direct applications in the body.
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Their discovery, reported today in the journal Biofabrication (doi:10.1088/1758-5090/ab0681), could be extremely useful for future use in wound healing and tissue engineering.
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Lead author Professor Dorothea Brüggemann, from the University of Bremen, said: "The protein we used is called fibrinogen. It is an extracellular glycoprotein found in blood plasma and plays a major role in wound healing by assembling into a fibrous network to form a provisional extracellular matrix (ECM) that helps with wound closure."
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Because of its versatile molecular interactions, fibrinogen is often processed into hydrogels and fibrous scaffolds for cell culture and tissue engineering applications in vitro. However, existing ways of doing this - such as electrospinning or the preparation of fibrin hydrogels - use organic solvents, high electric fields or enzymatic activity, which change the molecular structures or native protein functions of fibrinogen.
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To solve this, the team wanted to find out if they could develop a simple and well-controllable way to make three-dimensional scaffolds while retaining fibrinogen's properties.
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Professor Brüggemann said: "For the first time, we were able to assemble fibrinogen into dense, three-dimensional scaffolds without using high voltages, organic solvents or enzymatic activity. Our biofabrication process can be controlled simply by adjusting the fibrinogen and salt concentration, and the pH range."
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The dimensions of the scaffolds reached diameters in the centimetre range and a thickness of several micrometres. With 100 to 300 nm, the diameters of self-assembled fibres were in the range of native
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ECM fibres and fibrin fibres in blood clots. Professor Brüggemann added: "This novel class of fibrinogen nanofibres holds great potential for various biomedical applications. For example, in future studies on blood coagulation our immobilised fibrinogen nanofibres could provide a valuable in vitro platform for initial drug screening. On novel wound healing applications, it will be highly interesting to study the interaction of fibroblasts and keratinocytes with our free-standing fibrinogen scaffolds."
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