Fabrication of silk sercin based biomaterials for angiogenic hemostatic and multimodal imaging applications

Abstract

Biomaterial is a material designed to interact with living organisms for disease diagnosis and treatment. Biomaterials derived from natural sources possess various advantages such as biocompatibility, low cost, renewability, ease of fabrication, availability, and non-immunogenicity. Silk sericin is a naturally occurring hydrophilic macromolecular protein extracted from the silkworm, Bombyx mori. Silk sericin is used for biomedical applications due to its numerous biological activities such as biocompatibility, anti-oxidation, anti-coagulation, anti-ageing, anti-bacterial, anti-tyrosinase, biodegradable, less immunogenic, and photoluminescent properties. Silk sericin promotes collagen production, cell adhesion, proliferation, migration, and aids healing of wounds. Therefore, silk sericin has attracted more attention in various fields such as tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. In the field of biomedicine, silk sericin in different forms such as films, scaffolds, nanofibers, hydrogels, sponges, nanocomposites are often utilised as carrier for delivering drugs or growth factors. Silk sericin, a globular protein is composed of 18 amino acids that help in blending, cross-linking and co-polymerization with other polymers, metals and radiopaque compounds to fabricate the silk sericin based biomaterials. In the current work, silk sericin was combined with fish collagen and loaded with graphene oxide nanoparticles to study their pro-angiogenic potency for treating ischemic diseases. Silk sericin was blended with sodium alginate and aloe vera for preparing films with anti-bacterial, and hemostatic activities. Computed tomography was performed using radiopaque silk sericin nanocomposites for diagnosing melanoma tumor. Magnetic resonance imaging was performed using magnetic silk sericin nanocomposites prepared using goat blood and their role in detecting melanoma tumor was determined. The in vitro and in vivo results proved the use of silk sericin based biomaterials scaffolds, films, and nanocomposites for biological applications. newlineKeywords: Silk sericin, angiogenesis, hemostasis, computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging. newline newline