Design and integration of a nanohybrid functional biomaterial with enhanced mechanical and thermal properties

Nanohybrid functional biomaterials with advanced properties can provide a competitive edge in diverse biomedical applications from diagnosis to therapeutic treatments. This work describes the design of a green functional biomaterial composed of type I collagen reinforced with cellulose nanowhiskers (CNWs) to effectively enhance the rigidity of collagen and to better mimic the morphology and profile features that are characteristic to biological tissues. Careful control of the processing conditions resulted in the successful grafting of CNWs within the collagenous medium and gave rise to the formation of a three-dimensional rigid percolating network; fact which imparted a significant improvement in the systems mechanical and thermal stability at small amount of nanofiller concentration. Similarly, the initial biocompatibility of the collagen-cellulose nanohybrid composite was probed by in-vitro incubation of human-bone-marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), which resulted in the invasion and proliferation of MSCs within the hydrogel nanomaterial at day 8 of culture. We believe that the green nanohybrid composite in this study with its unique features could open new perspective design in the self-assembly of functional biomaterials for diverse range of biomedical applications.