Toshiyuki Ikoma
Artificial Bone based on Fish Scale Collagen
Department of Metallurgy and Ceramics Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Type I collagen, a rigid rod-like shape with 300 nm in length and 1.5 nm in diameter, has been well known as one of important extracellular matrices in organism as a supporting function and a cellular scaffold, which is found in bone, skin, muscle, tendon, cornea stroma, etc. The atelocollagen, extracted from skin/bone of bovine or porcine with enzymatic (pepsin) treatment, has been widely used as biomaterials and tissue engineered scaffolds. The thermal stability of the collagen is dependent on the contents of Hyp and is of great importance to design the novel biomaterials and the tissue engineered scaffold. Mammal-derived biological substances would be sometimes be at a risk for infection of virus. We have focused on fish, especially tilapia (warm fresh-water fish) as an alternative resource of collagen, since fish is far species to human being and has no zoonotic disease reported yet. The reason why tilapia was selected is that it is farmed in large amount in south-eastern Asia for food. The scale collagen shows good cyto-compatibility and upregulates the ALP activity of human-mesenchymal stem cell. In this study, we fabricated the nanocomposites of tilapia scale collagen and hydroxyapatite, and investigated new bone formation ability in vivo.