The promotion of angiogenesis using biomaterials promises to be a biocompatible strategy to alleviate the damage and tissue loss caused by disease, age and/or traumatic injury. This event requires the efficient activation of specific cell signaling pathways by certain growth factors, such as fibroblast growth factor (FGF-2). However, the use growth factors as therapeutic agents can be costly and does not always bring about stable blood vessel formation in vivo due to rapid protein clearance and premature degradation. One way to increase the lifetime and the activity of growth factors is to design stable peptide-based biomaterials that mimic their bioactivity and prolongs cell signaling. For this purpose, we have designed a novel peptide amphiphile (PA) FGF-2 mimetic molecule capable of forming supramolecular nanoribbons in solution. The FGF2-PA nanoribbons were capable of increasing the survival, proliferation and migration of the endothelial cells (HUVECs) in vitro by activating the corresponding FGFR1 and ERK1/2 signaling pathways with high efficiency as the native FGF-2. These results showed how the FGF2-PA nanoribbons could be used as a supramolecular biomaterial for the promotion of vasculature in vivo without the use of growth factors. Future work will focus on testing this material in 3D gels using myocardial infarction (MI) and spinal cord injury (SCI) in vivo models.

Promotion of cell survival and migration using FGF-2 mimetic peptide amphiphile nanoribbons

251st National Meeting (2016)

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