Another step forward for tissue engineering appears at innovations-report: collagen "is the most important structural protein in the body ... collagen has defied the efforts of biomedical researchers who have tried mightily to synthesize it for use in applications ranging from new wound-healing technologies to alleviating arthritis. The reason: Scientists were unable to synthesize the human protein because they had no way to link the easily made short snippets of collagen into the long, fibrous molecules necessary to mimic the real thing." Now, the problem has been solved. "We can make collagen that duplicates nature exactly, but we can diverge from that when it is desirable ... Now we can make synthetic collagen that's longer than natural collagen. We just don't have to take what nature gives us. We can make it longer and stronger."

Link: http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/life_sciences/report-55291.html