SCIENTISTS ARE making spider silk in the lab and tailoring it for the treatment of burn victims and diabetics.
“We figured out which parts of the silk gene in the spider are important and then put them into a bacteria,” explained Assistant Prof My Hedhammar, from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.
She is presenting her work at the annual conference of the European Society of Biomaterials in Dublin this week.
The bacteria grow quickly so they produce lots of the silk, which can be used by scientists to make a film, foam or mesh structure.
Prof Hedhammar found that human skin cells attach to the silk fibres and can grow. These skin cells growing on the structured spider silk could aid in repairing damaged skin, for example in the treatment of burns victims, she added.
Insulin-producing cells can also grow on the spider silk. Cell-covered silk frameworks could be transplanted into diabetic patients, allowing the insulin cells to re-establish in the patient, she said.
Diabetes is also the focus of work from researchers at the Network of Excellence for Functional Biomaterials at NUI Galway, who are giving a talk at the conference.
Diabetes-related chronic wounds can result in lower limb amputations, surgery that incurs a huge medical, economic and social burden. Even the most rigorous treatments available have not had great success in lowering the rate of amputations in diabetes patients, according to the Galway researchers. They are working on a gene-therapy solution, as diabetics can have a genetic problem in their wound healing cells.
Their project looks at what is going wrong in the faulty cells and identifies new genes that can be used as therapy to make wound healing cells work properly.