In vivo characterizations of the immune properties of sericin: an ancient material with emerging value in biomedical applications

The biosafety of sericin remains controversial. The misunderstanding regarding sericin causing adverse biological responses have been clarified by extensively reviewing relevant literatures and experimentally demonstrating that sericin exhibits mild inflammatory responses, negligible allergenicity, and low immunogenicity in vivo. This study supports that sericin is biosafe as a natural biomaterial.Z.Y.J., Y.S., and Y.J. contributed equally to this work. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China Programs (81272559 and 81572866), the International Science and Technology Corporation Program of Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (S2014ZR0340), the Science and Technology Program of Chinese Ministry of Education (113044A), the Frontier Exploration Program of Huazhong University of Science and Technology (2015TS153), the Natural Science Foundation Program of Hubei Province (2015CFA049), and the Hubei Province “Hundreds of Talents” Program. S.C.K. presently holds an ERA Chair Full Professor position at the 3B’s Research Group, University of Minho, Portugal, supported by the European Union Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 under grant agreement nº 668983 - FoReCaST.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio