Tissue engineering keratin

S.F. Timmons, C.R. Blanchard,R.A. Smith, Keratin-based tissue engineering scaffold Google Patents, 2002. 

Electrospun SF-based fibers were prepared from aqueous regenerated silkworm silk Bombyx mon)/PEO solutions to be used as scaffolds for tissue engineering (Jin et al. 2004). PEO supplied good mechanical properties to the electrospun fibers. An MeOH posttreatment induced an amorphous to silk p-sheet conformational transition. The electrospun silk membrane was washed with water to remove PEO in order to improve the cell adhesion and proliferation. These silk fibrous membranes were nonimmunogenic, biocompatible, and capable of supporting bone marrow stromal cell (BMSC) attachment. In another work, electrospun wool keratin/silk fibroin (WK/SF) blend nanofibers exhibited higher Cu + adsorption capacity than SF nanofibrous membrane (Ki et al. 2007). 

The hydrophilic and biodegradable c-poly(glutamic acid) has been used to modify chitosan matrices, and the resulting cytocompatible composite biomaterial showed to be suitable for tissue engineering applications [56]. Another potential skin replacement blend has been prepared using chitosan and the cysteine-rich major structural fibrous protein keratin that supported fibroblast attachment and proliferation, demonstrating to be a good substrate for mammalian cell culture [137]. 

KRs, due to these features and their ability to support also the sustained release of therapeutic agents, have attracted both academic and industrial interest. Keratin-based biomaterials, indeed, could find applications in several fields, such as tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, drug delivery, trauma, and medical devices. 

Bhardwaj, N., Sow, W.T., Devi, D., Ng, K.W., Mandal, B.B., Cho, N.J., 2015. Silk fibroin-keratin based 3D scaffolds as a dermal substitute for skin tissue engineering. Integr. Biol. (Camb) 7, 53-63. 

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