Development of a Silk-Chitosan Blend Scaffold for Bone Tissue Engineering

There is a pressing need for bone graft substitutes to augment bone regeneration in patients with damaged or diseased bone tissues. Currently, autologous bone graft is the gold standard but its use is limited by supply and donor site morbidity. Consequently, tissue engineering is seen as a solution to the shortage of functional bone graft substitutes. In the scaffold-guided approach to bone tissue engineering, it requires the development of a three-dimensional scaffold to mimic the native 3D environment of the bone cells. In addition, the scaffold material would need to be biocompatible, biodegradable, and possess the appropriate mechanical properties similar to that of the native tissue. In this study, silk and chitosan were combined to produce a blended scaffold using the lyophilization technique. The resulting scaffolds were seeded with bone marrow derived mesenchymal stem cells and subjected to osteogenic stimulation. Results were shown to support cell growth and proliferation, eventually resulting in a mineralized extracellular matrix. It is hoped that the resulting scaffold would become a highly functional bone graft substitute and further optimization work will be done to achieve this goal.