Designing strategies to deliver functional proteins at physiologically relevant concentrations using chemically cross-linked biocompatible hydrogels is a major field of research. However, the impact of cross-linking chemistry on the encapsulated protein bioactivity is rarely studied. Here we examine the two well-known cross-linking reactions namely; hydrazone cross-linking chemistry and thiol-Michael addition reaction to form hyaluronic acid (HA) hydrogels. As a therapeutic protein, we employed recombinant human bone morphogenetic protein-2 (rhBMP-2) for this study. Incubation of rhBMP-2 with HA functionalized with a thiol diminished phosphorylation of Smad 1/5/8, a signal transducer for osteogenic differntiation, whereas an aldehyde functionalized HA had no effect. This indicates that thiol functionalized polymers indeed has an impact on protein function. To validate this result in an in vivo setting we performed BMP-2 induced bone formation in a rat ectopic model. These experiments revealed that the hydrazone-cross-linked HA-hydrogel induced significantly higher bone formation (18.90 ± 4.25 mm3) as compared to the HA-thiol-Michael hydrogels (1.25 ± 0.52 mm3) after 8 weeks as determined by micro-computed tomography. The histological examination of the neo-bone indicated that hydrazone-hydrogels promoted a better quality of bone formation with improved mineralization and collagen formation as compared to the thiol-Michael hydrogels. We believe such a direct comparison of two cross-linking chemistries will provide new insight for developing biomaterials for protein delivery for in vivo applications.
Keywords: bone tissue engineering; cross-linking chemistry; drug delivery; hyaluronic acid; regenerative medicine.