Bandages made from spider silk could potentially heal wounds, or even replace damanged skin all together.
Around wounds due to diabetic ulcers and pressure sores in the US alone, with annual treatment costs of $25 billion. So the hunt is on for new, low cost ways to treat these conditions, as well as new materials for skin grafts to replace tissue lost to burns or lacerations.
The challenge is to create dressings that act as a scaffold to promote skin renewal, but without provoking an immune response or bacterial infections. And surprising as it might seem, spider silk is a good option.
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鈥淪pider silk has an elasticity which matches that of skin,鈥� says My Hedhammar of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. 鈥淪ilk is made from protein, which is also the main component around the cells in skin. The silk kind of replaces the collagen found in skin.鈥�
Silk engineering
Hedhammar鈥檚 team used spider silk protein produced by genetically engineered E. Coli bacteria. A key advantage of this production method is that chemicals found in the body which promote cell growth, such as binding agents and growth factors, can be genetically engineered onto to the silk protein, as well as antimicrobial proteins that are naturally found in skin.
However, this modified spider silk is relatively costly, so the researchers put a thin layer on another type of silk, derived from the cocoons of silkworms.
They used this combined material to make a mat for dressing wounds, and also made it into a porous sponge for use as artificial skin.
The researchers grew human skin cells on the dressing to test it out. They used fibroblasts and endothelial cells, which form the base layer of our skin, and keratinocytes, which form the outer layer.
They found that the silk material promoted the growth of the skin cells to produce a layered tissue similar to human skin, and that the antimicrobial agents prevented the growth of bacteria.
鈥淭his material allows cells to grow in a way that looks like real skin,鈥� says Hedhammar. Next, they plan to test the silk skin on animals.
ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces
