For millennia silk has been used for sutures in medical procedures. Recently, medical researchers have been investigating new uses for this age-old material. This book, a collection of essays by biomedical researchers, looks at the latest therapies using different preparations of silks. Intended for tissue engineering scientists and other biomedical researchers, the authors look at such silk-based therapies as using it as a scaffold for regenerating muscle tissues, growing intervertebral disk tissues, and for capillary growth. These therapies show far less reactions from the human immune system than using synthetic materials, and have better biodegradation properties as well. Annotation ©2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
Silk is increasingly being used as a biomaterial for tissue engineering applications, as well as sutures, due to its unique mechanical and chemical properties.Silk Biomaterials for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine discusses the properties of silk that make it useful for medical purposes and its applications in this area.
Part one introduces silk biomaterials, discussing their fundamentals and how they are processed, and considering different types of silk biomaterials. Part two focuses on the properties and behavior of silk biomaterials and the implications of this for their applications in biomedicine. These chapters focus on topics including biodegradation, bio-response to silk sericin, and capillary growth behavior in porous silk films. Finally, part three discusses the applications of silk biomaterials for tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and biomedicine, with chapters on the use of silk biomaterials for vertebral, dental, dermal, and cardiac tissue engineering.
Silk Biomaterials for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine is an important resource for materials and tissue engineering scientists, R&D departments in industry and academia, and academics with an interest in the fields of biomaterials and tissue engineering.
- Discusses the properties and applications of silk for medical purposes
- Considers pharmaceutical and cosmeceutical applications
Silk has been used for centuries in medicine as sutures. The unique mechanical and chemical properties of this material and the ability to genetically tailor the protein have meant that silk is now being used increasingly for biomaterials and tissue engineering applications. This book discusses the applications of silk for medical purposes with the first set of chapters covering the fundamentals and properties of silk for biomedical applications. Contributions in the second set of chapters look at a wide range of medical applications including tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, drug delivery and pharmaceutical applications.