Rationally Designed Redox-Sensitive Protein Hydrogels with Tunable Mechanical Properties

Protein hydrogels are an important class of materials for applications in biotechnology and medicine. The fine-tuning of their sequence, molecular weight, and stereochemistry offers unique opportunities to engineer biofunctionality, biocompatibility, and biodegradability into these materials. Here we report a new family of redox-sensitive protein hydrogels with controllable mechanical properties composed of recombinant silk-elastin-like protein polymers (SELPs). The SELPs were designed and synthesized with different ratios of silk-to-elastin blocks that incorporated periodic cysteine residues. The cysteine-containing SELPs were thermally responsive in solution and rapidly formed hydrogels at body temperature under physiologically relevant, mild oxidative conditions. Upon addition of a low concentration of hydrogen peroxide at 0.05% (w/v), gelation occurred within minutes for the SELPs with a protein concentration of approximately 4% (w/v). The gelation time and mechanical properties of the hydrogels were dependent on the ratio of silk to elastin. These polymer designs also significantly affected redox-sensitive release of a highly polar model drug from the hydrogels in vitro. Furthermore, oxidative gelation was performed at other physiologically relevant temperatures, and this resulted in hydrogels with tunable mechanical properties, thus, providing a secondary level of control over hydrogel stiffness. These newly developed injectable SELP hydrogels with redox-sensitive features and tunable mechanical properties may be potentially useful as biomaterials with broad applications in controlled drug delivery and tissue engineering.