Abstract
Worldwide, over 20 million patients suffer from bone disorders annually. Bone scaffolds are designed to integrate into host tissue without causing adverse reactions. Recently, chitosan, an easily available natural polymer, has been considered a suitable scaffold for bone tissue growth as it is a biocompatible, biodegradable, and non-toxic material with antimicrobial activity and osteoinductive capacity. In this work, chitosan was covalently and selectively biofunctionalized with two suitably designed bioactive synthetic peptides: a Vitronectin sequence (HVP) and a BMP-2 peptide (GBMP1a). Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) investigations highlighted the presence of the peptides grafted to chitosan (named Chit-HVP and Chit-GBMP1a). Chit-HVP and Chit-GBMP1a porous scaffolds promoted human osteoblasts adhesion, proliferation, calcium deposition, and gene expression of three crucial osteoblast proteins. In particular, Chit-HVP highly promoted adhesion and proliferation of osteoblasts, while Chit-GBMP1a guided cell differentiation towards osteoblastic phenotype.
Highlights
Nowadays, bone tissue engineering (BTE) still represents the most valid alternative way to try to overcome the actual limits in bone healing [1,2,3]
Up to the present, the gold standard procedure followed by orthopedic surgeons for the reconstruction of massive bone defects is still represented by the use of autografts, allografts, or xenografts [4,5,6]
Chit-HVP and Chit-GBMP1a infrared spectra are reported in Figure 1; the spectrum of pristine chitosan is reported for comparison
Summary
Bone tissue engineering (BTE) still represents the most valid alternative way to try to overcome the actual limits in bone healing [1,2,3]. The selection of an appropriate material for scaffold fabrication represents a critical stage in BTE [11,12,13], and the interest in using natural materials (e.g., collagen, silk, fibrin, glycosaminoglycans, hyaluronic acid, alginate, gelatin, etc.) is increasing [13,14,15,16]. In this scenario, chitosan, a deacetylated derivate of chitin, represents a widely used scaffolding material that has proved to be biocompatible, bioactive, biodegradable, and possesses antimicrobial properties [17,18,19,20,21]
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