Page 352 - AWSAR 2.0

328 || AWSAR Awarded Popular Science Stories - 2019
Now Silk Can Also be Worn
by Stem Cells to Express Themselves and Differentiate!
Ms. Smita Patil*
Email: smile20smita@gmail.com
Silk fibres have been used as a medical suture material for centuries; in recent years it has also gained a lot of interest
to be used as a material for culturing and growing stem cells. In our lab at Centre for Biomedical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, we have been working with silk as a biomaterial to develop new tissue engineering strategies.
Bone and joint pathologies, intervertebral disc degeneration/low back pain, tendinopathies, fractures, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis are among the largest groups of debilitating diseases today. Consequently, there is a need for further research to develop better, more effective cell-based bone tissue engineering products for clinical translation and therapeutic applications. Typically,
bone has multiple types of cells such as bone cells (osteoblasts) and cartilage cells (chondrocytes). We have been working on development of strategies to direct differentiation of stem cells using silk fibroin- based scaffolds, for bone tissue engineering applications. In 2018, we developed a simple strategy to direct stem cell differentiation by functional group modification on silk films in 2 dimensions (2D). We demonstrated that stem cells can be changed into bone and cartilage cells on the same scaffold without adding any exogenous enhancers.
A three dimensional silk fibroin-based scaffold, which allows simultaneous formation of scaffolds and cell encapsulation with minimal damage to the cells, is unavailable, as most of the methods involve use of some cell
* Ms. Smita Patil, PhD Scholar from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, is pursuing her research on “Controlling Stem Cell Differentiation for Tissue Engineering”. Her popular science story entitled “Now Silk Can Also be Worn by Stem Cells to Express Themselves and Differentiate!” has been selected for AWSAR Award.