Abstract
Collagen, which is often used in healthcare materials and biomedical research, is largely extracted from animal sources. Recombinant human collagen has the potential to be a promising alternative to animal collagen which has many shortcomings, including immunogenicity and lack of biocompatibility. Currently, recombinant human collagen has been expressed in both eukaryotic and prokaryotic hosts with varying degrees of success. One issue with recombinant collagen across all hosts is the inability to achieve full length collagen with native amounts of post-translational modifications, prompting much exciting research in this direction. There has also been much effort in improving yield and biomimicry of recombinant collagen. This review discusses collagen structure and current methods for extracting animal collagen, before introducing current research in synthesising recombinant human collagen in various hosts, and finally highlighting challenges in the field.
Highlights
Collagen is an important biomaterial that has many medical applications, ranging from fillers for cosmetic use, carriers in drug delivery systems [1], surgical suture [2], to scaffolds in tissue engineering [3, 4]
As a host for recombinant human collagen production, E. coli is limited by its lack of endogenous post-translational modifications such as hydroxylation
Bio-production of recombinant collagens still suffer from low yield, high cost and the products are unable to achieve the same post-translational modifications seen in native collagens, making current recombinant collagens both expensive and non-biological
Summary
Collagen is an important biomaterial that has many medical applications, ranging from fillers for cosmetic use, carriers in drug delivery systems [1], surgical suture [2], to scaffolds in tissue engineering [3, 4]. Collagen can form injectable hydrogels [9, 10] or serve as delivery vehicles [1, 11, 12] due to its innate ability to gel with temperature change, and is amenable to chemical modifications. Despite their versatility, collagens that are currently in use by the medical field are mostly animal derived, which may potentially cause immunogenic reactions and suffer from unwanted batch-to-batch variabilities [13]. The review first covers the understanding of collagen structure and its biosynthesis
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