Bioengineered growth factors are better than natural ones
Artificial proteins accelerate wound healing
Kirill Stasevich, CompulentaDuring the restoration of damaged tissues, many complex molecular and cellular events occur, regulated by special proteins called growth factors.
These proteins are involved in the development of the embryo, they direct the growth of germ – and not only germ – cells, they also turn on when the damaged tissue at the wound site needs to be replaced with a healthy one.
It is clear that medicine could not pass by such remarkable growth factors: they began to be used in order to accelerate tissue regeneration. However, it was not possible to fully realize the possibilities of growth factors, largely due to the peculiarities of the functioning of these proteins. And then it occurred to researchers from the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne (Switzerland) that the growth factor can be done by yourself, especially if you take the best specimen available as a sample.
Growth factors interact with a number of other proteins in the intercellular matrix, and the strength of the factor itself depends on how well they "communicate" with these intermediaries. Scientists analyzed 25 growth proteins by this parameter and found one among them, PIGF-2, which interacted better (stronger) with its partners.
Then a fragment of 22 amino acids long was found in PIGF-2 in the molecule, which was responsible for its strong binding to other proteins. When this fragment was tried to be sewn to other growth factors, their affinity for proteins increased by 2-100 times – which meant that such modified factors could be used in much smaller quantities than is usually required.
Growth factors with a particularly strong binding fragment sewn to them were tested on mice with diabetes, in which the ability to repair tissues and heal wounds was severely weakened. As the researchers write in the journal Science (Martino et al., Growth Factors Engineered for Super-Affinity to the Extracellular Matrix Enhance Tissue Healing), synthetic factors showed better results than natural ones: wounds healed faster, bones recovered better, and the side effects that usually occur when using growth factors were almost absent.
Of course, these proteins can only be called artificial with clarification: in fact, they are modified natural growth factors, and they were modified again with a "natural" fragment of the same growth factor. In the future, the authors of the work are going to modify several more proteins in this way in order to try to improve these constructions according to the maxim. Well, then, perhaps, it will be the turn of the actual medical tests.
Prepared based on the materials of the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne:
Faster wound healing from bioengineered growth factors.
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