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The need to develop novel therapeutic wound healing solutions becomes more apparent with the prevalence of diabetes and associated cutaneous wounds in the United States. In the body, wound healing is accomplished through four distinct stages including hemostasis, inflammation, proliferation, and remodeling. Tissue engineering with hydrogels offers a unique opportunity to accelerate wound healing at each stage of the process by serving as scaffolds for therapeutic drugs. However, current hydrogel solutions do not efficiently address the wet environment of the wound site which poses adhesion as a problem.

Previously our lab has synthesized CEC, a protein triblock copolymer consisting of an elastin domain fused between two cartilage oligomeric matrix protein coiled-coil (COMPcc) domains with known gelation properties. This protein has been engineered to incorporate the noncanonical amino acid 3,4-dihydroxyphenylalanine (Dopa).

The incorporation of Dopa in synthetic proteins is inspired by aquatic mussels known to display great wet adhesive abilities because of the chemical interactions mediated by this amino acid with wet surfaces. The biomimetic properties of CEC-Dopa as a wet adhesive allows it to be utilized in a wide variety of biomedical applications, specifically in the domain of wound healing and tissue regeneration. Furthermore, proteins are a natural choice for biomedical therapeutics because of their inherent biocompatible and biodegradable properties.

To investigate CEC-Dopa’s potential as a wet adhesive, the protein CEC-Y served as a negative control. Following expression of both proteins, circular dichroism (CD) and rheology was used to characterize structure and mechanical integrity respectively. The peel test will be used to conclude the adhesive strength of the enhanced CEC-Dopa protein hydrogel. This is done by measuring the force needed to pull apart the hydrogel from a given substrate as measured by the Instron Universal Testing Machine.