Synthesis and characterization of amphiphilic elastin-like recombinamers: Development of self-assembling nanoparticles and hydrogels

Abstract

Nanotechnology is one of the science fields with a great development in the last years, with an imperative necessity to produce systems with specific functionalities at nanometric scale. Nanotechnology has provided sophisticated tools that have revolutionized many areas of knowledge, such as biomedical science, where enables improving efficiency and accuracy of current diagnostic techniques, and developing safer and more effective therapeutics1. In many cases, these systems are inspired by nature, trying to mimic nanometric structures formed by proteins and or other macromolecules in the living tissues and cells. Elastin-Like-Recombinamers (ELRs) are excellent candidates to develop systems that mimic the extracellular matrix structure due to their smart behavior and their recombinant nature. And they could be applied for instance, to develop treatments for connective tissue diseases as arthrosis. The recombinant nature is one of the most important features of these polymers, that allows to produce them by recombinant expression in Escherichia coli from predesigned genes. So we are able to design new materials with enormous potential that integrate new properties incorporated by genetic engineering for specific applications in nanomedicine. The study shown here is focused on the development of new systems intended for injectable hydrogels in regenerative medicine, and for spherical nanocarriers in drug delivery. Based on the ability of self-organization into nanostructures demonstrated by previous amphiphilic tetrablock ELR2, three new copolymers have been developed varying the individual blocks size, of the original tetrablock ELR. Thus, the aim of this investigation is to shed light about the influence of the block sizes on the physicochemical properties and on the structuration of the nanoparticles and of the hydrogels, with the final goal of setting the basis to perform a rational design from the sequence level.