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Gelatin Nanospheres Serve as Building Blocks for Tissue Regenerative Gels

Nanowerk has a spotlight piece on a joint research project between Radboud University in the Netherlands and Sichuan University in China that has developed a method for producing oppositely charged gelatin nanospheres that enable a bottom-up approach for injectable gels that can aid in tissue repair.

The research, which was initially published in the Wiley journal Advanced Materials, improves on colloidal gels that have been developed in the past that were often cytotoxic because of their high charge density.

"We have used gelatin since both positively and negatively charged gelatin is commercially available without the need to chemically modify these biopolymers" says Huanan Wang, a PhD student in the Department of Biomaterials at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center, in the Nanowerk piece.

As the Nanowerk piece points out, one of the key features of this research was that they demonstrated that commercially available biopolymers, like gelatin, can be used in tissue regeneration without any additional chemical modification that could potentially negatively impact its biocompatibility.