Artificial silk fibers as biomaterials and their applications in biomedicine

In recent decades, scientists have been committed to scaling up artificial silk fibers with similar mechanical properties to natural spider silks. It remains challenging to achieve this target partly due to the limited understanding of the silk assembly mechanism. Given the intrinsic nature of biocompatibility and biodegradability, the versatile silk proteins, either in regenerated or recombinant type, could be well fabricated in fiber format through various aqueous biomimetic spinning approaches for biomedical applications ranging from optical waveguides, drug delivery, wound healing to regenerative medicines. The artificial silk fiber could be physically or chemically modified with new functionalities to meet practical demand and favorably act as a promising drug carrier with a high specific surface area to incorporate biologically active molecules. This chapter will summarize the fabrication of artificial silk fibers from proteins to spinning and their applications in biomedicine.