Institute of Nano Science and Technology, Sector 81, Knowledge city, Mohali, 140306, Punjab, India.
Biomater Sci. 2021 Jun 4;9(11):3911-3938. doi: 10.1039/d0bm02049d.
Neural tissue engineering holds great potential in addressing current challenges faced by medical therapies employed for the functional recovery of the brain. In this context, self-assembling peptides have gained considerable interest owing to their diverse physicochemical properties, which enable them to closely mimic the biophysical characteristics of the native ECM. Additionally, in contrast to synthetic polymers, which lack inherent biological signaling, peptide-based nanomaterials could be easily designed to present essential biological cues to the cells to promote cellular adhesion. Moreover, injectability of these biomaterials further widens their scope in biomedicine. In this context, hydrogels obtained from short bioactive peptide sequences are of particular interest owing to their facile synthesis and highly tunable properties. In spite of their well-known advantages, the exploration of short peptides for neural tissue engineering is still in its infancy and thus detailed discussion is required to evoke interest in this direction. This review provides a general overview of various bioactive hydrogels derived from short peptide sequences explored for neural tissue engineering. The review also discusses the current challenges in translating the benefits of these hydrogels to clinical practices and presents future perspectives regarding the utilization of these hydrogels for advanced biomedical applications.
神经组织工程在解决当前医学疗法在大脑功能恢复方面面临的挑战方面具有巨大的潜力。在这种情况下，自组装肽因其多样的物理化学性质而引起了相当大的兴趣，这些性质使它们能够很好地模拟天然 ECM 的生物物理特性。此外，与缺乏固有生物信号的合成聚合物相比，基于肽的纳米材料可以很容易地设计为向细胞呈现重要的生物学信号，以促进细胞黏附。此外，这些生物材料的可注射性进一步拓宽了它们在生物医学中的应用范围。在这种情况下，由短生物活性肽序列获得的水凝胶由于其易于合成和高度可调的性质而受到特别关注。尽管它们具有众所周知的优势，但短肽在神经组织工程中的应用仍处于起步阶段，因此需要进行详细的讨论以引起人们对这一方向的兴趣。本文综述了用于神经组织工程的各种短肽序列衍生的生物活性水凝胶。本文还讨论了将这些水凝胶的优势转化为临床实践所面临的挑战，并对这些水凝胶在高级生物医学应用中的未来前景进行了展望。
