POTENTIAL APPLICATION OF SILK FIBROIN AS A NATURAL BIODEGRADABLE POLYMER FOR MECHANICAL BONE STIMULATION

F. ZABALETA; V. E. BOSIO

Congreso; 2nd Meeting on Natural Polymers - EPNAT; 2020

Natural polymers have promising applications as biodegradable materials for regenerativemedicine. Among them, silk from Bombyx mori cocoons presents biocompatibility and aninteresting versatility in terms of biodegradation rate, mechanical and structural properties. Theaim of this study was synthesize hybrid scaffolds based on silk fibroin (SF) and magneticnanoparticles (MNp) in order to promote an external stimulation of the mechanoreceptors forcellular regeneration improvement. Salt leaching was employed to scaffolds synthesis of SFpurified by boiling. Different boiling times and differents pHs were explore during the SFpurification and scaffold synthesis respectively. MNp were synthetized by co-precipitation frombasic solutions of Fe2+/Fe3+ under inert atmosphere. These nanoparticles were characterizedusing a Vibrating Sample Magnetometer. The results showed mass magnetization value of 87.76emu/g, close to the saturation magnetization of magnetite in bulk at low temperature (92 emu/g)and above the value corresponding to maghemite. MNp were introduced into the scaffolds viainclusion during the gelation process or after the obtention of the scaffold by dip-coatingtechnique. Optimized scaffold, prepared with SF obtained after 40 minutes of thermal digestionand pH 6 presented highly homogeneous and interconnected pores with pore sizes distributionof 340 µm +/- 10 (SEM observation with ImageJ® Software analisys). The presence of MNp didnot affect the scaffold formation or the structural properties and the MNp showed magneticsuceptibilty which could be profited as stimulator of natural bone mechanical receptors. Thepromising results observed for hybrid scaffolds open the possibility for future extended uses asa valid alternative for bone regeneration in tissue engineering therapies.