The broader impact of this I-Corps Team project is a new collagen-mimetic material that will lead to the development of safer, cheaper, and customizable products for medical applications. Collagen has applications in medicine, pharmaceuticals, personal care products, food industry, and leather industry. The incidences of transmission of pathogens from animal products have added to the market pressure for safer, non-mammalian sources of collagens. The novel, collagen-mimetic fibrils are expected to be a safe collagen-alternative for many collagen-related applications. These new materials can be designed to cater the needs of specific applications and is potentially more versatile and effective than the traditional collagen products. The potential commercial impact is a new generation of collagen-related biomaterials for skin care, bone and joint health, controlled drug release devices, and wound healing.
This I-Corps Team project will identify and establish relationships with potential partners across the medical field and the personal care industry. Collagen has long been sought after for its combination of tensile strength and biocompatibility. The emerging peptide biotechnology raised hope of producing collagen-mimetic peptides that can be a safe, economically viable alternative to collagens extracted from animals. Until recently, however, protein design could not produce peptide materials that adapt to the fibril conformation of natural collagens. This project builds upon the development of the first of such fibril-forming triple helical peptide. The self-assembled collagen-mimetic fibrils have the characteristic axial repeating structure reminiscent of that of the D-period of fibrillar collagens in tissues. The collagen-mimetic fibrils can be used as molecular scaffold to create biomaterials that have the supramolecular structure and the tensile strength comparable to that of natural collagen fibrils. The bottom-up approach makes it possible to customize the materials for specific applications.
