Our bodies are dependant on proteins. They’re crucial to life; they serve a great deal of functions in human physiology. The most abundant protein in the body is one called collagen. It’s a primary part of skin, blood vessels, and tendons. Despite collagen being so prevalent in our bodies, up until now scientists have had a hard time coming up with a synthetic version of collegan. The primary reason is that proteins like collegan are so complex, folding into a variety of 3-dimensional shapes that trap water molecules, making structures called hydrogels, that are very difficult to make in the laboratory.
For that reason, up until now the most common type of collagen used in any type of cosmetic or reconstructive plastic surgery is gathered from animals. Unfortunately, because it’s not inherently human, there are risks that the patient will begin to “reject” the implanted collagen. The patients body recognizes the collagen as foreign, and mounts an immune response against it.
Fortunately, there has been a very recent advance by researchers at Rice University in Texas, published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Chemistry. They have developed a method of making synthetic collagen compatible with humans in less than an hour. It’s not truly collagen, but it’s a hydrogel that has enough similar properties that it can mimic the scaffold functions of natural collagen. Tests in petri dishes demonstrate that the immune response was minimal from human cells residing with the collagen, and that enzymes in the human body that are designed to break down human collagen broke down the synthetic “collagen” in a similar way.
While clinical trials in humans are years in the future, this is the first collagen substitute that doesn’t rely on stem cells or animal sources but is instead built up rapidly from a liquid solution of peptides, the building blocks of proteins. It’s possible that within a decade, we’ll be able to “grow” replacement tissue-equivalents for damaged skin, tendons, ligaments, and blood vessels as rapidly as we need them; the potential for medicine is obvious, and extremely exciting.
The source of this article can be found at:
Lesley E. R. O’Leary, Jorge A. Fallas, Erica L. Bakota, Marci K. Kang, Jeffrey D. Hartgerink. “Multi-hierarchical self-assembly of a collagen mimetic peptide from triple helix to nanofibre and hydrogel.” Nature Chemistry, 2011.