Silkworms Help Grow Better Organ-Like Tissues in Labs
New research from biomedical engineers at Duke has helped to develop a silk-based, ultrathin membrane that can be used in "organ-on-a-chip" (OOC) models to better parallel typical cell and tissue behaviors, helping to create functional tissues used for research. Samira Musah, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and her colleague George (Xingrui) Mou, a PhD student in Musah’s lab and first author on the paper, discovered that silk fibroin, which comes from silkworms, is a better membrane from this research because it is protein-based, rather than the standard polymer membrane.
This research was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health