Surface Functionalized Nanosilica Incorporated Silk A Novel Hybrid Biomaterial Scaffold For Bone Tissue Regeneration

Abstract

ABSTRACT newlineNanoengineered biomaterials have dramatically expanded the range of tools used for the tissue regeneration due to its remarkable change in properties, such as large surface-to-volume ratio, unusual strength, low surface energy, high surface reactivity and excellent thermal and electric properties. Silica-based materials play a fundamental role in this field due to their osteoconductive, osteoproductive and osteoinductive properties. In the past years, sol-gel processes have been incorporated allowing the porosity of silica based materials to be controlled at the nanometric scale and its advancement in regenerative properties. The field of inorganic-organic nanocomposites is growing rapidly, because such hybrid materials can possess combined properties of both the incorporated inorganic materials and the base organic materials. The combination of silica-based biomaterials with organic components leads to a new organic inorganic hybrid material with improved mechanical properties. The main aim of the current study is to synthesize an organic-inorganic hybrid biomaterial for bone tissue regeneration. Here silica, extracted from rice husk, is chosen as the inorganic material and silk fibroin, extracted from Bombyx mori silkworm, act as the organic phase material. The extraction of silica from rice husk is relatively simple and inexpensive. As a reusable bio-resource, recovering silica from rice husk has important economic and environmental implications. Here, nanosilica is extracted from rice husk using sol-gel synthesis and silk fibroin solution is extracted from Bombyx mori silkworm. The obtained nanosilica is surface modified and made into a composite material along with silk using sol-gel technique. Surface modification of nanosilica was done using three different silanes i.e., Hexamethyldisilazane (HMDZ), Methyltrimethoxysilane (MTMS), Aminopropyltriethoxysilane (APTES) and was characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) and contact angle measur