New way to make biomedical devices from silk yields better products with tunable qualities

Researchers led by engineers at Tufts University have developed a novel, significantly more efficient fabrication method for silk that allows them to heat and mold the material into solid forms for a wide range of applications, including medical devices. The end products have superior strength compared to other materials, have physical properties that can be "tuned" for specific needs, and can be functionally modified with bioactive molecules, such as antibiotics and enzymes. The thermal modeling of silk, described in Nature Materials, overcomes several hurdles to enable manufacturing flexibility common to many plastics.

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