Healing wounds with hair

• Main Author: Sow, Wan Ting.
• Other Authors: School of Materials Science and Engineering
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Materials::Biomaterials
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/44300
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The skin is the first barrier that protects the human body from the external environment and hence it is important to explore potential wound dressings to improve wound healing on severe skin wounds. Tissue engineered scaffolds can act as an effective platform for cell adhesion and proliferation to promote wound healing. Hence keratin emerges as an attractive biological material for such scaffold as it is the main cytoskeleton protein found in the epidermis of the skin. Besides, electrospinning has been identified as a cost effective and scalable technique to produce nanoscale fibers for biomaterial scaffolds. Hence, in this project, electrospinning of keratin extracted from human hair is being explored. To facilitate the electrospinning of keratin, a small amount of poly (ethylene oxide) (PEO) was added into the keratin solution for electrospinning. A variety of solutions with different keratin/PEO concentrations were electrospun and comparisons on the morphologies of the fibers were made using the scanning electron microscopy. The best sample was characterised by various techniques such as fourier-transformed infra red spectroscopy, differential scanning calorimetry and thermogravimetric analysis. Electrospinning of 30wt% keratin and 0.5wt% PEO solution has resulted in a good deposition of fibers accumulated into a fibrous mat. The average diameter of the fibers electrospun was 330 nm and the properties of the fibrous mat followed closely to the properties of the extracted keratin. Therefore, electrospinning of keratin/PEO solution provides potentially useful option to fabricate 3-dimensional scaffolds and the idea of adding PEO to keratin opens up an appealing area in exploring the self assembly of keratin.