11 January 2022

Great news: a new scientific publication about GIOTTO research activity has just been published on the Journal “Nanomaterials” inside the special issue entitled “Nanoparticles for Bio-Medical Applications”. The article entitled “Incorporation of Superparamagnetic Iron Oxide Nanoparticles into Collagen Formulation for 3D Electrospun Scaffolds” has been written by the project partners POLITO, Maastricht University, Universidad Complutense de Madrid and by Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid C.S.I.C. and CIBER de Bioingeniería Biomateriales y Nanomedicina. The paper explores, for the first time, the combination of type-I collagen and superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) to design magnetic and biocompatible electrospun scaffolds. Among the different existing biomaterials, in fact, superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) have been widely explored in several biomedical applications such as magnetic resonance imaging, cell separation and detection, tissue repair, magnetic hyperthermia, drug and gene delivery. Thanks to their superparamagnetic properties, size, biocompatibility, multifunctionality and possibility of further surface modification with various chemical agents, SPIONs represent a promising tool in many fields of medicine. Here’s the article’s abstract.

Abstract

Nowadays, there is an ever-increasing interest in the development of systems able to guide and influence cell activities for bone regeneration. In this context, we have explored for the first time the combination of type-I collagen and superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) to design magnetic and biocompatible electrospun scaffolds. For this purpose, SPIONs with a size of 12 nm were obtained by thermal decomposition and transferred to an aqueous medium via ligand exchange with dimercaptosuccinic acid (DMSA). The SPIONs were subsequently incorporated into type-I collagen solutions to prove the processability of the resulting hybrid formulation by means of electrospinning. The optimized method led to the fabrication of nanostructured scaffolds composed of randomly oriented collagen fibers ranging between 100 and 200 nm, where SPIONs resulted distributed and embedded into the collagen fibers. The SPIONs-containing electrospun structures proved to preserve the magnetic properties of the nanoparticles alone, making these matrices excellent candidates to explore the magnetic stimuli for biomedical applications. Furthermore, the biological assessment of these collagen scaffolds confirmed high viability, adhesion, and proliferation of both pre-osteoblastic MC3T3-E1 cells and human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (hBM-MSCs).

Keywords: SPIONstype-I collagenmagnetic scaffoldselectrospinninghuman bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cellsbone regenerationbone tissue engineering

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