Development of a novel bioink based on host-guest supramolecular interactions

• Autor(a) principal: Fonseca, Ana Lia Guimarães Lourenço da
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/29368
• topic: Hydrogel; Bioink; Host-guest supramolecular interactions; Silk; Gelatine

At present, due to the shortage of tissues and organs for transplantation, there is a growing attention towards the field of regenerative medicine. 3D bioprinting techniques are used to create cell embedded scaffolds that mimic the solid 3D network that most cells require to survive. Hydrogels are ideal scaffold candi-dates because of their hight water content and tissue-like elasticity. However, bioinks used in 3D bioprinting need to be simultaneously fine-tuned to be bio-compatible and printable, as such, there is still a need for improvement. To tackle this challenge the preparation of a bioink made of silk and cyclodex-trin modified gelatine (GelM) was investigated. While, silk provides strong me-chanical features, elasticity and controllable biodegradability, gelatine offers bio-adhesive motifs. The results show that the host-guest interactions between the cyclodextrin on gelatine and the Tyr on silk polymeric chain seemed to be correlated with shear-thinning behaviour and an increase in viscosity of the Silk-GelM blend at rest. Furthermore, the presence of these physical interactions imparted self-healing properties and caused an overall increase in elasticity of the construct. All these characteristics are advantageous for printability and cellular viability. Additionally, preliminary printability tests strongly suggest that the developed formulation can be successfully printed.