A synthetic, injectable hydrogel developed to deliver drugs and encourage tissue growth turns out to have therapeutic properties all its own. Researchers in the Rice lab of chemist and bioengineer Jeffrey Hartgerink had just such an experience with the hydrogels they developed as a synthetic scaffold to deliver drugs and encourage the growth of cells and blood vessels for new tissue.To do so, they often tested the gels by infusing them before injection with bioactive small molecules, cells or proteins. What they didn’t realize until recently was that the hydrogel itself has significant therapeutic qualities.The lab reported in the Elsevier journal Biomaterials that a particular hydrogel, a self-assembling multidomain peptide (MDP) with the amino acid sequence K2(SL)6K2, is indeed bioactive.

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