Synthesis and Application of Collagens for Assembling a Corneal Implant

Recombinant or artificial designer collagens have developed to a point where they are viable candidates for replacing extracted animal collagens in regenerative medicine applications. Biomimetic corneas made have shown promise as replacements for human donor corneas, and have previously been fabricated from several different collagens or collagen-like peptides (CLPs). Prokaryotic expression systems allow for cheap, rapid, gram scale production of collagens/CLPs. Here, we describe a procedure for production of collagen-like peptides for the manufacture of a biomimetic cornea.