Biomimetic engineering of a fully bio-based system in nanomedicine

Design of materials and devices by mimicking the fascinating systems found in nature, have enabled scientists to discover new techniques to treat diseases from diagnosis to therapeutic care. With the recent advances in nanomedicine, the length-scale of this design has further extended down into a nano-sized array. Inspired by the two natural assemblies found in nature; cellulose and collagen; we have designed a new class of green functional material with nano-sized arrangement. The fabricated material composed of collagen hydrogel reinforced by cellulose nanowhiskers in order to effectively enhance the rigidity of collagen and to better mimic the morphology and profile features existed in biological tissues. The biocompatibility of the hydrogel nanocomposite was also investigated by the invasion and proliferation of human bone marrow derived mesenchymal stem cells around the materials at 8 day of culture. We believe that our biomimetically-engineered platform in this study could increase the biomedical applications of fully bio-based systems such as scaffolding in tissue engineering.