27 Discussion
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- The amino acids and fibrous protein allow the silk to be biodegradable while also maintaining a high stiffness and strength.
- The group found that due to the pliable polymers within silk, it can be used in many applications however further advancements in technology are required in order to properly use it.
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- Currently, silk is used in a lot of high-performance textiles with some branching out into other fields including the medical field. Since the market is projected to increase within the next coming years, the use of them as a biomaterial in related devices will dramatically increase
- Silk used to be solely produced by harvesting the silk from worms or spiders, this posed heavy ethical concerns as it kills millions of worms every year.
- For a while, silk production was extremely slow and required a lot of manual labor, which made it very expensive and not widely adopted. The advancement of technology has allowed synthetic silk to be made, dramatically increasing production and lowering cost.
- As silk is being made more ethically and the cost is decreased, adoption by the wider society will increase.
- The main long-term benefits would be very low body rejection and a high lifetime of the device. The challenges with further use of silk in a clinical setting are the high cost of material and the combination of other materials to allow for the full functionality of the device.
- A major clinical application would be using silk in ocular prostheses. Current prostheses have a low rejection rate but gradually increase throughout the patient’s lifetime which necessitates the need for materials the body will not reject. Silk is biodegradable and due to its protein makeup, won’t be rejected by the body, allowing for a long-lasting ocular prosthesis.
- Further research into using silk could allow more products to be biocompatible as well as more flexible and pliable.
- Through interdisciplinary collaboration, further breakthroughs could arise by combining key aspects of different fields. By using silk, combining its flexibility and biocompatibility with other products allows a greater range of usage for the products.
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