TECHNOLOGY: Protein Scaffolds

A group led by Dr. Gerald E. Schneider in MIT recently published a paper which found that injecting a class of self-assembling proteins called "sapeptides" can promote nerve fiber regrowth in severed optic tracts of hamsters. The optic tract is the nerve bundle that connects that retina of the eye to the brain, and is crucial to the process by which we integrate the light that we sense into the intricate representations of the world that we experience. While the extent to which the experience of vision restored in these hamsters is unknown, the lab found that the regenerated hamsters were able to respond to and follow visual stimuli (demonstated by head movements from the hamsters).

The sapeptides are short and simple sequences of about a dozen of amino acids joined into oligopeptides. These peptides self assemble in physiological conditions to form scaffolds around damaged tissue. Though the mechanism of regeneration is unknown, these scaffolds have been shown to promote regeneration of tissue ranging from optic tract nerves to damaged pancreatic cells.

Sapeptides are interesting because of their self assembling nature and the fact that their components - simple amino acids - are easily degraded by natural physiological processes. Nothing has been tested in humans, but the possibilities of biomaterial mediated tissue regeneration are very encouraging. Imagine the potential of these scaffolds when combined with stem cell therapy...