Controlled Decomposable Hydrogel Triggered with a Specific Enzyme

You-Ren Ji; Ya-Hsiang Hsu; Ming-Hua Syue; Ying-Chu Wang; Shyr-Yi Lin; Tsung-Wei Huang; Tai-Horng Young

doi:10.1021/acsomega.1c05178

Controlled Decomposable Hydrogel Triggered with a Specific Enzyme

ACS Omega. 2022 Jan 21;7(4):3254-3261. doi: 10.1021/acsomega.1c05178. eCollection 2022 Feb 1.

Authors

You-Ren Ji¹, Ya-Hsiang Hsu¹, Ming-Hua Syue¹, Ying-Chu Wang¹, Shyr-Yi Lin^{2

3}, Tsung-Wei Huang^{4

5}, Tai-Horng Young^{1

6}

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Biomedical Engineering, College of Medicine and College of Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei 100, Taiwan.
² Division of Gastroenterology, Department of Internal Medicine, Wan Fang Hospital, Taipei Medical University, Taipei 116, Taiwan.
³ Department of General Medicine, School of Medicine, College of Medicine, Taipei Medical University, Taipei 110, Taiwan.
⁴ Department of Electrical Engineering, College of Electrical and Communication Engineering, Yuan Ze University, Taoyuan 320, Taiwan.
⁵ Department of Otolaryngology, Far Eastern Memorial Hospital, New Taipei City 220, Taiwan.
⁶ Department of Biomedical Engineering, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei 100, Taiwan.

Abstract

In this study, superabsorbent polyelectrolyte hydrogels were synthesized by cross-linking a nondegradable poly (allylamine hydrochloride) (PAH) and a recombinant protein with a specific enzymatic cleavage site. The recombinant protein was produced by E. coli with the pET-32b(+) plasmid, which is featured with the thioredoxin (Trx) gene containing a thrombin recognition site and a T7/lac hybrid promoter for high expression of recombinant protein. The swelling test shows that the composite hydrogel still maintained a high swelling ratio to 900% when 15% recombinant protein was cross-linked with PAH. The degradation test shows that such a PAH composite hydrogel could be decomposed by the addition of specific enzyme thrombin, which might lead to new biomedical applications of hydrogels needed to be decomposable by specific time not determined by the time period.