Affiliation:
1. CICECO–Aveiro Institute of Materials Department of Chemistry University of Aveiro Campus de Santiago Aveiro 3810‐193 Portugal
2. Drug Research Program Division of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Technology Faculty of Pharmacy University of Helsinki Helsinki FI‐00014 Finland
3. Department of Biomaterials and Biomedical Technology, PRECISION ‐ Personalized medicine Research Institute University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG), University of Groningen Ant. Deusinglaan 1 Groningen 9713 AV The Netherlands
Abstract
AbstractBiopolymeric implantable patches are popular scaffolds for myocardial regeneration applications. Besides being biocompatible, they can be tailored to have required properties and functionalities for this application. Recently, fibrillar biobased nanostructures prove to be valuable in the development of functional biomaterials for tissue regeneration applications. Here, periodate‐oxidized nanofibrillated cellulose (OxNFC) is blended with lysozyme amyloid nanofibrils (LNFs) to prepare a self‐crosslinkable patch for myocardial implantation. The OxNFC:LNFs patch shows superior wet mechanical properties (60 MPa for Young's modulus and 1.5 MPa for tensile stress at tensile strength), antioxidant activity (70% scavenging activity under 24 h), and bioresorbability ratio (80% under 91 days), when compared to the patches composed solely of NFC or OxNFC. These improvements are achieved while preserving the morphology, required thermal stability for sterilization, and biocompatibility toward rat cardiomyoblast cells. Additionally, both OxNFC and OxNFC:LNFs patches reveal the ability to act as efficient vehicles to deliver spermine modified acetalated dextran nanoparticles, loaded with small interfering RNA, with 80% of delivery after 5 days. This study highlights the value of simply blending OxNFC and LNFs, synergistically combining their key properties and functionalities, resulting in a biopolymeric patch that comprises valuable characteristics for myocardial regeneration applications.