Description
Soybean protein has been proposed for distinct applications within nutritional, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic industries
among others. More recently, soy-based biomaterials have also demonstrated promising properties for
biomedical applications.However, althoughmany reports within other fields exist, the inflammatory/immunogenic
potential of those materials is still poorly understood and therefore can hardly be controlled. On the contrary,
chitosan (Cht) has been well explored in the biomedical field, either by itself or combined with synthetic or other
natural-based polymers. Therefore, the combination of chitosan with soybean protein is foreseen as a suitable
approach to control the biological behavior of soy-based biomaterials. Under this context this work was designed to
try to understand the influence of chitosan in the host response elicited by soy-based biomaterials. Soybean protein
isolate powder (SI-P) and Cht powder (Cht-P) were injected as suspension into the intraperitoneal cavity of rats. SI-P
induced the recruitment of higher numbers of leukocytes compared to the Cht-P during the entire observation
period. In this sense, SI-P elicited a considerable reaction from the host comparing to the Cht-P, which elicited
leukocyte recruitment similar to the negative control.After subcutaneous implantation of the soybean and denatured
membranes, (SI-M and dSI-M) a severe host inflammatory reaction was observed. Conversely, Cht/soy-based
membranes (Cht/soy-based membranes) showed the induction of a normal host response after subcutaneous implantation
in rats, which allowed concluding that the addition of chitosan to the soy-based membranes improved
their in vivo performance. Thus, the presented results assert the improvement of the host response, considering
inflammatory cells recruitment, and overall inflammatory reaction,when chitosan is combined to soybean. Together
with previous results that reported their promising physicochemical characteristics and their inability to activate
human polymorphonuclear neutrophils in vitro, the herein presented conclusions reinforce the usefulness of theCht/
soy-based membranes and justify the pursue for a specific application within the biomedical field.
; Marques, A. P. 
