Tissue engineering, first conceived in the 1980s, is now drawing tremendous social attention as the research progresses. Scaffold materials used to engineer tissues have been traditionally synthetic polymers, biocompatible porous inorganic materials and purified extracts of natural extra-cellular matrices. To date, there are no biomaterials in clinical use that possess both the safety of the polymers and ECM-like 3-dimensional environment for cells.
A group of self-assembling synthetic peptides ("PuraMatrix^TM"), developed at MIT are composed solely of natural amino acids found in organisms. These peptides self-assemble into nano-fiber of approximately 10 nm in diameter under physiological conditions, resulting in formation of hydrogel. In this hydrogel, many cell types are shown to adhere and proliferate, and injection of the gel with or without cells, promotes regeneration of tissues such as bone, brain and cardiac tissue. This peptide hydrogel is shown to be safe by animal safety tests and may become available for clinical application soon.