Silk fibroin based technology for industrial biomanufacturing

Natural biomaterials are more and more used for the development ofhigh technology solutions, setting the scene for a bio-based material economy thatresponds to the increasing demand of environmentally friendly products. Among nat-ural biomaterials, silk fibre protein called silk fibroin (SF) produced by the Bombyxmori L. insect, recently found a broad range of applications in biomedical field. SFsubstrates display remarkable properties like controlled biodegradability, flexibility,mechanical resistance and optical transparency, solution processability. These prop-erties combined with the water-based extraction and purification process make SF apromising material for sustainable manufacturing enabling to partially replace syn-thetic, plastic-based and non-biodegradable material use. The use of SF interfaces inbiocompatible electronic or photonic devices for advanced biomedical applicationshas been recently highlighted. However, the use of a natural biomaterial is challeng-ing due to the complex nature of the biological molecule, and it requires to tightlycontrol biomaterial properties during all the manufacturing steps. In this work, weshow the results obtained by in loco production of raw-material, defining the bestcondition forsilkwormselection and growth. The assessment and standardization ofextraction/purificationmethodologyarereportedwithreferencetothehighpurityandremarkable performance in terms of chemo-physical property and biocompatibilityof the obtained SF products. Finally, we demonstrate the fabrication, characterizationand validation of microfluidic and photonic components of a lab-on-a-chip devicefor biodiagnostic based on biomanufactured SF.