Soysomes and Other Functional Biomaterials from Sucrose Soyate Derivatives

Abstract

Biomaterials serve as interventional tools in medicine to treat, improve or replace diseased tissues, organs or function of the body. Although several polymeric biomaterials already exist, they often present challenges, at material level, such as non-biodegradability, degradation into acidic by-products or tissue incompatibility, or at functional level such as failure to sustain prolonged release of therapeutic payload for a desired period. Research has been focused on investigating new polymeric candidates to address these problems of current systems. The use of renewable resources to generate smart polymers for biomedical and pharmaceutical purposes presents a new and exciting avenue for biomaterials. As part of these efforts, a new set of biomaterials were developed from plant-derived high molecular weight (~3.0 kDa) compounds. The advantages of biobased materials include availability for large-scale synthesis, facile post-synthetic modification, biocompatibility, improvement of functional properties and affordability. In this project we used sucrose soyates, i.e. octa-esters obtained from conjugation of sucrose molecules and multiple soybean oil fatty acid chains, to prepare three groups of functional biomaterials namely: a). self-assembled soy-based nano-constructs, b). blended soy-based free-standing films and c). three-dimensional cross-linked soy-based soft matrices. Here, we will discuss the fabrication and physical, chemical and mechanical characterization of these biomaterials prepared from soy-based compounds, as well as, the assessment of their functional performance in biological environment.