Osteoinductive peptides that induce the bone formation are attractive to apply in developing new generation of bone implants that not only provide mechanical support but also promote new bone formation. However, how to immobilize peptides onto the bone implants surface, hydroxyapatite (HA) in most cases, efficiently and easily remains an issue that requires more efforts to dedicate to. Here we proposed to use a catechol functionalized dendron as the HA-targeting moiety, and conjugate the dendron with osteoinductive peptides through simple amidation reaction to obtain a modular molecule that one part strongly binds with HA, the other part interacts with the cells and induce new bone formation. The relationship between catechol number and binding affinity to HA was studied with quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation (QCM-D) to optimize the dendron structure. And the osteoinductivity of peptides after covalently linked to the dendron was evaluated by biological experiments in vitro.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/matthew_becker/90/