University of Leicester
Browse

Collagen-fibrinogen lyophilised scaffolds for soft tissue regeneration

Download (3.89 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2019-08-15, 16:47 authored by Jennifer Shepherd, Daniel Bax, Serena Best, Ruth Cameron
A significant body of research has considered collagen as a scaffold material for soft tissue regeneration. The main structural component of extra-cellular matrix (ECM), collagen's advantages over synthetic polymers are numerous. However, for applications where higher stiffness and stability are required, significant cross-linking may affect bioactivity. A carbodiimide (EDC) cross-linking route consumes carboxylate groups that are key to collagen's essential cell recognition motifs (GxOGER). Fibrinogen was considered as a promising additive as it plays a key role in the process of wound repair and contains RGD integrin binding sites which bind to a variety of cells, growth factors and cytokines. Fibrinogen's binding sites however, also contain the same carboxylate groups as collagen. We have successfully produced highly interconnected, porous collagen-fibrinogen scaffolds using a lyophilisation technique and micro-computed tomography demonstrated minimal influence of either fibrinogen content or cross-linking concentration on the scaffold structure. The specific biological effect of fibrinogen additions into cross-linked collagen are considered by using films as a model for the struts of bulk scaffolds. By considering various additions of fibrinogen to the collagen film with increasing degrees of cross-linking, this study demonstrates a significant biological advantage with fibrinogen addition across the cross-linking concentrations typically applied to collagen-based scaffolds.

Funding

The authors wish to acknowledge the support of the European Research Council for the Advanced Grant 320598 awarded to REC and the EPSRC for the Established Career Fellowship EP/N019938/1 awarded to REC and SMB. They also wish to acknowledge funding for DB from the Peoples Programme of the EU 7th Framework Programme (RAE no: PHF-GA-2013-624904).

History

Citation

Materials, 2017, 10 (6), 568

Author affiliation

/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING/Department of Engineering

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Published in

Materials

Publisher

MDPI

eissn

1996-1944

Acceptance date

2017-05-11

Copyright date

2017

Available date

2019-08-15

Publisher version

https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1944/10/6/568

Notes

Externally hosted supplementary file 1 Doi: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.9603

Language

en

Usage metrics

    University of Leicester Publications

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Licence

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC