Hengjie Su, PhD |Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences; Xiang Ji, PhD; Bowen Zhang, PhD; Shuo Meng, MD
Competition Sponsor: Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences
Awardee Year: 2022
Periodontitis is the 11th highly prevalent disease all over the world. It is the major reason of tooth lost. One of the periodontal treatments is to reconstruct the alveolar with the guided bone regeneration (GBR) membrane and the bone graft. The most clinical used GBR membranes are collagen membranes. However, they have disadvantages of low suture strength and being easily infected. Hence, it is urgent to have new membranes that are more reliable. Electrospun chitosan membranes that were treated with new post-treatment showed biocompatible, biodegradable and antibiotic properties, that were expected to be the next generation of the economic GBR membrane. Besides, they showed better mechanical strength and bone growth assistance than some commercialized GBR membranes. In a previous animal study, some chitosan membranes showed too fast degradation rates to fully cover the defect area during the bone reconstruction, that was the main obstacle to commercialize the chitosan membrane. In this research, two crosslinkers, genipin and Na2HPO4, will be chosen to crosslink the electrospun chitosan membrane to increase the structure connections and decrease their degradation rates. This proposal is expected to overcome the difficulty of controllable stable degradation for the electrospun chitosan membrane, that makes the clinical application become possible. It will also enable the future of providing quality periodontal treatments for most patients.
To learn more about this proposal, email healthylongevity@nas.edu.