# Programmable Keratinous Bio-adhesives for Recalcitrant Wound Recovery

> **NIH NIH F32** · YALE UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $66,390

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
Chronic, recalcitrant wounds and ulcers pose significant challenges to treating diabetic, obese, and elderly
patients. New treatment options are needed to address rising rates; requiring a targeted approach to re-initiate
the normal healing cascade. Tissue adhesives are widely used alternatives to staples and sutures. These rapidly
curing polymer gels, when applied to wounds, reduce scarring, hospital time, and infection compared to standard
sutures, while eliminating the need for needles and suture removal. Unfortunately, these wound treatment
options offer little bioactivity; unsuitable for treating chronic wounds. Extracellular matrix (ECM) dressings (e.g.
keratin) are bioactive, but offer little adhesive strength and rely on animal extractions that reduce efficacy in
biocompatibility and bioactivity. Aimed at broadening available treatment options for diabetic and aging patients,
this research seeks to design, build, and test novel genetically functionalized recombinant proteins with innate
therapeutic bioactivity as a foundation for configurable drug delivery devices; starting with the construction of a
bioactive, biocompatible tissue adhesive for early wound care in patients at high risk of wound recalcitrance.
Currently, there are no engineered ECM protein tissue adhesives. As a foundational design, I will employ
established genomically recoded organism polymer synthesis technologies for multiple site-specific
incorporations of two non-standard amino acids (nsAAs), muco-adhesive L-dihydroxyphenylalanine (L-DOPA)
and photo-cross-linkable norbornene amino acid (NorAA), each into separate epithelialization-inducing,
recombinant human hair keratin heterodimer subunits, K85 and K35, respectively. Native and nsAA-keratins will
be assembled into scaffolds, either via slow thiol-mediated filament assembly or rapid, on-site norbornene
crosslinking, and subjected to structural characterization and cell viability assays. NorAA-DOPA-keratin scaffolds
are expected to rapidly cure in seconds and present significantly enhanced adhesive strength, comparable to
available dermal adhesives. In vivo characterizations of designed adhesive scaffold variants will be performed
on C57BL/6J diabetic mice; e.g. healing rates, adhesive strength, morphometric analyses, and histopathological
assays; comparing results to currently available tissue adhesives. I hypothesize that applying these novel keratin
adhesives to recalcitrant dermal wounds will significantly enhance healing rates, block bleeding, and reduce
scarring in diabetic mice.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10232644
- **Project number:** 1F32GM142204-01
- **Recipient organization:** YALE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Michael William Grome
- **Activity code:** F32 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $66,390
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2021-08-01 → 2023-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10232644

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10232644, Programmable Keratinous Bio-adhesives for Recalcitrant Wound Recovery (1F32GM142204-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10232644. Licensed CC0.

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