The modification of collagen scaffolds for application in regenerative medicine

The use of collagen-based biomaterials in regenerative medicine has rapidly increased over the past decade. Over this period, a variety of collagen modification techniques have been developed for the purpose of retaining therapeutics. Most techniques rely on chemical treatments, but a biomimetic strategy to non-covalently modify collagen scaffolds with collagen mimetic peptides (CMPs) offers compelling advantages. The goal of this project is to create a stable, tunable collagen-based delivery system using a simple peptide-based strategy that retains collagen bioactivity. This study will be one of the first to thoroughly examine the controllability of nanoparticle release through variation of CMP sequence and CMP density on nanoparticles, and to modify collagen with nanoparticles utilizing a non-GPO-based, potentially mass-producible CMP. Currently, one GPO- and one GPP-based peptide have been synthesized, and their ability to be retained on a collagen scaffold under physiological conditions for over a week has been demonstrated. The incorporation of CMPs onto nanoparticles has also been found to enable retention on collagen scaffolds for similar periods of time, and our recent findings suggest that CMP sequence and density directly affect the release rate. In the future, we will continue to focus on varying both CMP sequence and density to attain release profiles consistent with wound repair kinetics.