Coiled Coil Crosslinked Alginate Hydrogels Dampen Macrophage-Driven Inflammation.

Alginate hydrogels are widely used for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine due to their excellent biocompatibility. A facile and commonly used strategy to crosslink alginate is the addition of Ca that leads to hydrogelation. However, extracellular Ca is a secondary messenger in activating inflammasome pathways following physical injury or pathogenic insult, which carries the risk of persistent inflammation and scaffold rejection.

Peptide-based supramolecular vaccine systems.

Currently approved replication-competent and inactivated vaccines are limited by excessive reactogenicity and poor safety profiles, while subunit vaccines are often insufficiently immunogenic without co-administering exogenous adjuvants. Self-assembling peptide-, peptidomimetic-, and protein-based biomaterials offer a means to overcome these challenges through their inherent modularity, multivalency, and biocompatibility. As these scaffolds are biologically derived and present antigenic arrays reminiscent of natural viruses, they are prone to immune recognition and are uniquely capable of functioning as self-adjuvanting vaccine delivery vehicles that improve humoral and cellular responses.