Investigation of human hair keratin based nanofiberous scaffold for skin tissue engineering application

Abstract Keratin-based nanofibers were fabricated using the electrospinning technique and their potential as scaffolds for tissue engineering was investigated. Keratin, extracted from the human hair was blended with poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) in an aqueous medium. Morphological characterization of the fabricated PVA-keratin nanofiber (PK-NFs) random and aligned scaffolds was performed [1,2]using a scanning electron microscope (SEM) analysis. Functional groups and structural studies were done by infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis. SEM study revealed the formation of uniform and randomly oriented nanofibers with an interconnected three-dimensional network structure. The mean diameter of the nanofibers ranged from 100 to 250 nm. FTIR study suggested that PVA interacted with keratin by hydrogen bonding. Moreover, the in-vitro cell culture study of PK-NFs scaffolds was tested on murine embryonic stem cells (ESCs), human keratinocytes (HaCaT) and dermal fibroblast (NHDF) cell lines. Results revealed that PK-NFs scaffolds were non-toxic and biocompatible by supporting the growth of murine ESCs, HaCaT and NHDF cells. Further, the immunocytochemical characterization revealed the successful adhesion and growth of ESCs, HaCaT and NHDF cells on PK-NFs scaffolds. Moreover, there was no noteworthy difference in terms of cell growth and viability irrespective of the random and aligned internal fibril arrangement of the PK-NFs scaffolds. The in-vitro cell culture study demonstrated the potential of PK-NFs as a scaffold for skin tissue engineering and it can also be a favorable material for different tissue engineering applications.