(765g) Incorporating MMP Degradable Features Into Supramolecular Filament Hydrogels

Amphiphilic peptides and peptide-conjugates have served as effective building blocks for constructing well-defined nanostructures for a wide range of applications in nanotechnology and nanomedicine, including tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, drug delivery and cell behavior studies. Peptides that have a high propensity to assume a beta-sheet conformation can self-assemble into one-dimensional supramolecular nanofilaments, and can further form entangled 3D network for use in biomedical research. In this work, we report our design of matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) responsive hydrogels that can be triggered by a particular type of MMPs. Our ultimate goal is to construct hydrogels that mimic naturally occurring collagens in terms of morphology, stiffness and enzymatic-specific degradation through the bottom-up design of self-assembling peptides and a post-crosslinking technique. The engineered hydrogels with controlled mechanical properties, surface chemistry and enzymatic degradability could find use in a great diversity of biomedical research, particularly in the studies of cancer cell migration and metastasis.