Journal of Oral Tissue Engineering

TOPICS
Self-Assembling 3-Dimensional Scaffold Peptide Hydrogel for Bone and General Tissue Regeneration

Jiro TAKEI

3-DMatrix Japan, Ltd., Tokyo


J Oral Tissue Engin 2005;3(2): 71-79

Full Text. DOI https://doi.org/10.11223/jarde.3.71

SYNOPSIS
Tissue engineering, first conceived in the 1980s, is now drawing tremendous social attention as the research progresses. Scaffold materials used to engineer tissues have traditionally been synthetic polymers, biocompatible porous inorganic materials and purified extracts of natural extra-cellular matrices (ECMs). To date, there are no biomaterials in clinical use that possess both the safety of the polymers and ECM-like 3-dimensional environments for cells.
A group of self-assembling synthetic peptides ("PuraMatrix
TM"), developed at MIT are composed solely of natural amino acids found in organisms. These pep-tides self-assemble into nano-fibers of approximately 10 nm in diameter under physiological conditions, resulting in formation of hydrogel. In this hydrogel, many cell types are shown to adhere and proliferate, and injection of the gel with or without cells, promotes regeneration of tissues such as bone, brain and cardiac tissue. This peptide hydrogel is shown to be safe by animal safety tests and may become available as a medical device for clinical application soon.

Key words:Self-assembling peptide, hydrogel, scaffold, periodontal bone reconstruction, PuraMatrix
TM