For a millennium, traders brought silk fabrics from the Far East along the Silk Road to Europe, where the beautiful yet tough material was fashioned into dazzling clothes. Today bioengineers are infusing the natural protein fibers spun by silkworms with enzymes and semiconductors. They are processing the modified strands under varying temperature, shear and acidic conditions to create novel materials with remarkable properties.

Physicians like silk sutures because they are strong and compatible with human tissue, meaning the body’s immune system doesn’t reject them. Our laboratory at Tufts University has recently extended those traits to make thin tubes that can be used as grafts to replace sections of clogged arteries, which could eliminate the need to extract a vein for that purpose from a patient’s leg for a coronary bypass, the usual procedure. James Goh and his colleagues at the National University of Singapore have regenerated an anterior cruciate ligament in a live pig’s knee using stem cells implanted in silk scaffolding.

This article was originally published with the title From Silk Cocoon to Medical Miracle.

4 Comments

1. 1. danimarie 09:22 AM 11/15/10

   I really don't like this picture. :( It's scary and freaky. For a second I thought it was an animal with a disease or something or really old. :(:( That's interesting though... silk... huh...

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2. 2. metroidfan 12:48 PM 11/15/10

   This is a very interesting topic and if perfected could revoloutionise the medical industry dramatically,although id agree i don't like the picture it's disturbing.

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3. 3. DRRICH 03:18 PM 11/15/10

   I don't know about the non-reactive concept. I use silk suture when I need a tissue to scar, ie, a vasectomy, so that the tube does not try to regrow. It is never hard to react to a foreign protein.

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4. 4. reflectogenesis 04:14 PM 11/15/10

   Would material from the moon be good for implants as it might not be 'seen' by any organic body .
   Could silk be the base for composite materials grown from the sorption of regolith silicates onto freshly spun yarn on the moon where the interaction of freshly spun silk directly with the native moon would produce strong attractive forces and organisational tendency of dust particles.
   peter reynolds
   reflectogenesis@hotmail.co.uk

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