Modification of Fibroins: Approaches to Get Optimise Scaffolds for Musculoskeletal Tissue Engineering

The components of musculoskeletal system that consists of bone, ligament tendons and muscles are most vulnerable to injury from sports and related activities. Replacing the injured tissues more specifically the bone is a challenge to tissue engineers. Aiming at regeneration of bone tissues, silk fibroin from Bombyx mori, a novel biocompatible natural polymer has been explored either alone or as organic/inorganic composites for optimal growth of bone cells or differentiation of stem cells to bone cells in vitro. In the process, raw silk fibroins need to be were degummed, usually by alkali treatment method, to ameliorate the cytotoxicity from sericin. Most recently, the nanofibers of silk from electrospinning has shown a promise for bone tissue engineering. To get nanofibers, the degummed silk is usually dissolved in compatible solutions i.e. CaCl2 in H2O or LiBr in C2H5OH at different concentrations followed by dialysis to remove toxic ions. The ion free silk solution can be Electrospun alone or can be blended with various biopolymers for the fabrication of nanofibre biodegradable composite. Other approaches like crosslinking an array of biopolymers with silk or freeze drying the silk fibroins are also in pipeline to develop a novel silk based scaffold for bone tissue engineering.