Engineering and Functionalization of Gelatin Biomaterials: From Cell Culture to Medical Applications

Abstract

Health care and medicine were revolutionized in recent years by the development of biomaterials, such as stents, implants, personalized drug delivery systems, engineered grafts, cell sheets, and other transplantable materials. These materials not only support the growth of cells before transplantation but also serve as replacements for damaged tissues in vivo. Among the various biomaterials available, those made from natural biological sources such as extracellular proteins (collagen, fibronectin, laminin) have shown significant benefits, and thus are widely used. However, routine biomaterial-based research requires copious quantities of proteins and the use of pure and intact extracellular proteins could be highly cost ineffective. Gelatin is a molecular derivative of collagen obtained through the irreversible denaturation of collagen proteins. Gelatin shares a very close molecular structure and function with collagen and thus is often used in cell and tissue culture to replace collagen for biomaterial purposes. Recent technological advancements such as additive manufacturing, rapid prototyping, and three-dimensional printing, in general, have resulted in great strides toward the generation of functional gelatin-based materials for medical purposes. In this review, the structural and molecular similarities of gelatin to other extracellular matrix proteins are compared and analyzed. Current strategies for gelatin crosslinking and production are described and recent applications of gelatin-based biomaterials in cell culture and tissue regeneration are discussed. Finally, recent improvements in gelatin-based biomaterials for medical applications and future directions are elaborated.

Proteins and Peptides as Important Modifiers of the Polymer Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering Applications—A Review

“…For this reason, both types of gelatin possess different features, such as amino acids composition, charge, and isoelectric point. It is worth noting that either types of gelatin are commercially available at relatively low cost [50,[61][62][63].…”

“…This phenomenon is tightly associated with no or low presence of aromatic amino acids (i.e., tyrosine, tryptophan, and phenylalanine) in gelatin molecule. Thus, gelatin is found to form significantly lower amount of immunogenic aromatic radicals compared to collagen [14,50,[64][65][66].…”

“…Thus, similarly to collagen, gelatin application alone is limited. For this reason, gelatin is combined with other polymers in order to enhance its mechanical properties as well as to promote biocompatibility of these polymers [50,61,62,66,67].…”

Advancement of Nanobiomaterials to Deliver Natural Compounds for Tissue Engineering Applications

“…Gelatin is a biocompatible and biodegradable natural polymer which is derived from collagen hydrolysis, and it has numerous applications as a scaffold in tissue engineering and carrier molecule in drug delivery [34,35]. There are some disadvantages of using gelatin in tissue engineering applications which include poor mechanical and thermal properties, it can be easily overcome by making a composite material [36]. Some of the gelatin-based composite materials and their potential benefits as a scaffold material for tissue engineering applications are briefly discussed here.…”

Anatase Incorporation to Bioactive Scaffolds Based on Salmon Gelatin and Its Effects on Muscle Cell Growth

“…Gelatin is a biomaterial with outstanding and well-known physical properties, which include high biodegradability and biocompatibility, and combined with collagen, they have generated promising results through a variety of tissue engineering formulations [6]. The source of the extracted gelatin establishes characteristics that affect the scaffold properties [7,8].…”