Development and Characterization of Innovative Peptide-Based Delivery Platforms

This study investigates the development of sericin-based hydrogels and nanohydrogels as innovative biomaterials for drug delivery and tissue engineering. Sericin, a silk-derived protein, was extracted under various conditions and subsequently functionalized with vinyl sulfone to enable crosslinking with thiolated hyaluronic acid via Michael addition. The resulting hydrogels demonstrated tunable mechanical and rheological properties, along with controlled gelation times, indicating their suitability for biomedical applications. Nanohydrogels were further fabricated through emulsion technique and characterized by dynamic light scattering, FTIR, and electron microscopy. These nanoparticles displayed favorable sizes (~200 nm), spherical morphology, and uniform dispersion. In vitro cytocompatibility assessments using mesenchymal stem cells revealed that nanogels were not cytotoxic. The results suggest that sericin-based systems hold promise for use in localized drug delivery and regenerative medicine. In addition, the supramolecular hydrogels formed by self- assembly of low molecular weight gelators were studied as drug reservoirs. The focus was on the tolerance of supramolecular hydrogels to formulation changes and the relationship between rheological properties and gelator leakage, which promoted the commercial application of supramolecular hydrogels as drug reservoirs.