Preparation and in vivo degradation of controlled biodegradability of electrospun silk fibroin nanofiber mats

Abstract Controlled biodegradability of biomaterials is very important because different functionality and durability are required for various purposes and for specific tissues and organs. From this point of view, silk‐based biomaterials have poor usability because of uncontrollable degradability, even though silk fibroin (SF) is highly biocompatible and a number of studies on silk biomaterials have been published to date. In this study, we prepared SF nanofiber mats that were recrystallized in different ways. These mats were fabricated by electrospinning with ethanol/propanol mixtures of various blend ratios, and their biodegradabilities in vitro and in vivo were evaluated using rats. As a result, we can suggest an established method to modulate the degradability of SF nanofibrous materials based on long‐term (12 months) observations. In particular, we elucidated how the SF nanofibers are degraded and incorporated with surrounding tissue by observation of fluorescein isothiocyanate–labeled SF nanofiber in vivo . Our findings suggest a method for controlling the degradation rate of SF for medical applications. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Biomed Mater Res Part A 100A:3287–3295, 2012.