Viruses as biomaterials

Viruses lacking the capacity to infect mammals exhibit minimal toxicity, good biocompatibility, and well-defined structures. As self-organized biomolecular assemblies, they can be produced from standard biological techniques on a large scale at a low cost. Genetic, chemical, self-assembly, and mineralization techniques have been applied to allow them to display functional peptides or proteins, encapsulate therapeutic drugs and genes, assemble with other materials, and be conjugated with bioactive molecules, enabling them to bear different biochemical properties. So far, a variety of viruses (infecting bacteria, plants, or animals), as well as their particle variants, have been used as biomaterials to advance human disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Specifically, the virus-based biomaterials can serve as multifunctional nanocarriers for targeted therapy, antimicrobial agents for infectious disease treatment, hierarchically structured scaffolds for guiding cellular differentiation and promoting tissue regeneration, versatile platforms for ultrasensitive disease detection, tissue-targeting probes for precision bioimaging, and effective vaccines and immunotherapeutic agents for tackling challenging diseases. This review provides an in-depth discussion of these exciting applications. It also gives an overview of the viruses from materials science perspectives and attempts to correlate the structures, properties, processing, and performance of virus-based biomaterials. It describes the use of virus-based biomaterials for preventing and treating COVID-19 and discusses the challenges and future directions of virus-based biomaterials research. It summarizes the progressive clinical trials of using viruses in humans. With the impressive progress made in the exciting field of virus-based biomaterials, it is clear that viruses are playing key roles in advancing important areas in biomedicine such as early detection and prevention, drug delivery, infectious disease treatment, cancer therapy, nanomedicine, and regenerative medicine. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Materials Science & Engineering: R is the property of Elsevier B.V. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

State-of-the-art review of advanced electrospun nanofiber yarn-based textiles for biomedical applications.

The pandemic of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has made biotextiles, including face masks and protective clothing, quite familiar in our daily lives. Biotextiles are one broad category of textile products that are beyond our imagination. Currently, biotextiles have been routinely utilized in various biomedical fields, like daily protection, wound healing, tissue regeneration, drug delivery, and sensing, to improve the health and medical conditions of individuals. However, these biotextiles are commonly manufactured with fibers with diameters on the micrometer scale (> 10 µm). Recently, nanofibrous materials have aroused extensive attention in the fields of fiber science and textile engineering because the fibers with nanoscale diameters exhibited obviously superior performances, such as size and surface/interface effects as well as optical, electrical, mechanical, and biological properties, compared to microfibers. A combination of innovative electrospinning techniques and traditional textile-forming strategies opens a new window for the generation of nanofibrous biotextiles to renew and update traditional microfibrous biotextiles. In the last two decades, the conventional electrospinning device has been widely modified to generate nanofiber yarns (NYs) with the fiber diameters less than 1000 nm. The electrospun NYs can be further employed as the primary processing unit for manufacturing a new generation of nano-textiles using various textile-forming strategies. In this review, starting from the basic information of conventional electrospinning techniques, we summarize the innovative electrospinning strategies for NY fabrication and critically discuss their advantages and limitations. This review further covers the progress in the construction of electrospun NY-based nanotextiles and their recent applications in biomedical fields, mainly including surgical sutures, various scaffolds and implants for tissue engineering, smart wearable bioelectronics, and their current and potential applications in the COVID-19 pandemic. At the end, this review highlights and identifies the future needs and opportunities of electrospun NYs and NY-based nanotextiles for clinical use.