Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts 02155, United States.
Center for Advanced Orthopedic Studies, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, 330 Brookline Ave., RN 115, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, United States.
ACS Biomater Sci Eng. 2024 Apr 8;10(4):2607-2615. doi: 10.1021/acsbiomaterials.3c01758. Epub 2024 Mar 13.
Conventional thinking when designing biodegradable materials and devices is to tune the intrinsic properties and morphological features of the material to regulate their degradation rate, modulating traditional factors such as molecular weight and crystallinity. Since regenerated silk protein can be directly thermoplastically molded to generate robust dense silk plastic-like materials, this approach afforded a new tool to control silk degradation by enabling the mixing of a silk-degrading protease into bulk silk material prior to thermoplastic processing. Here we demonstrate the preparation of these silk-based devices with embedded silk-degrading protease to modulate the degradation based on the internal presence of the enzyme to support silk degradation, as opposed to the traditional surface degradation for silk materials. The degradability of these silk devices with and without embedded protease XIV was assessed both in vitro and in vivo. Ultimately, this new process approach provides direct control of the degradation lifetime of the devices, empowered through internal digestion via water-activated proteases entrained and stabilized during the thermoplastic process.
传统设计可生物降解材料和设备的思路是调整材料的固有特性和形态特征以调节其降解速率，调节传统因素如分子量和结晶度。由于再生丝素蛋白可以直接热塑性成型以产生坚固的致密丝塑料样材料，因此这种方法为控制丝降解提供了一种新工具，通过在热塑性加工之前将丝降解蛋白酶混入块状丝材料中，从而可以控制丝降解。在这里，我们展示了这些基于丝的设备的制备方法，其中嵌入了丝降解蛋白酶，以根据酶的存在来调节降解，而不是传统的丝材料的表面降解。评估了具有和不具有嵌入蛋白酶 XIV 的这些丝设备的体外和体内的可降解性。最终，这种新的工艺方法通过在热塑性加工过程中夹带和稳定的水激活蛋白酶的内部消化，提供了对器件降解寿命的直接控制。
