Suruchi Poddar is about to submit her PhD thesis and she is looking for interesting opportunities for Postdoctoral studies in India and abroad. Her area of research is Tissue Engineering and Biomicrofluidics. She has published her results in international reputed journals. Her work in biomaterials earned her many accolades such as the Gold Medal Award at the Institute Day of IIT (BHU), Varanasi and she stood second at a conference in Rytro, Poland in 2018.

The present study relates to the development of a new process/methodological approach for the fabrication of a psyllium husk powder based scaffold systems. The cutting-edge enabling technologies of tissue engineering has been employed in the manufacturing of bioscaffolds withy microporous structure and nanofiber formation, tailored mechanical strength and integrity by chemical and enzymatic cross-linking. To the best of our knowledge, this investigation reports for the very first time (i) the cross-linking procedure of psyllium husk powder and gelatin by the use of 1-ethyl-3-(3-dimethylaminopropyl)-1-carbodiimide hydrochloride and N-hydroxysuccinimide (EDC-NHS) coupling reaction [1], [2], (ii) psyllium husk based novel bioink which is enzymatically cross-linked for three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting process [3] and (iii) the formation of a psyllium husk powder based nanofibrous electrospun sheet for tissue engineering applications, as shown in the given image below. Although psyllium is available in various forms such as husk, seed, powder, fiber etc., mucilage/gum extracted from psyllium seed and husk has widely been reported in tissue engineering and pharmaceutical applications. This study proposes the direct use of readily available psyllium husk powder as the biomaterial, without any further modifications. The extraction of psyllium gum from psyllium husk requires some tedious and time consuming processes such as collecting and washing of seed or husk, soaking overnight, drying by heating for several hours, filtration or precipitation followed by further washing in an organic solvent, filtered, centrifuged, collected, solvent evaporated dried under reduced pressure and finally passed through a suitable sieve to store in an airtight container for further use [4]. Therefore, to exclude the need of such trivial and time-consuming processes this invention suggests direct use of psyllium husk powder without any further purification and collection, for the preparation of psyllium husk powder-based degradable bioscaffolds for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.