An Overview of the Use of Equine Collagen as Emerging Material for Biomedical Applications

Abstract

Type I collagen has always aroused great interest in the field of life-science and bioengineering, thanks to its favorable structural properties and bioactivity. For this reason, in the last five decades it has been widely studied and employed as biomaterial for the manufacture of implantable medical devices. Commonly used sources of collagen are represented by bovine and swine but their applications are limited because of the zoonosis transmission risks, the immune response and the religious constrains. Thus, type-I collagen isolated from horse tendon has recently gained increasing interest as an attractive alternative, so that, although bovine and porcine derived collagens still remain the most common ones, more and more companies started to bring to market a various range of equine collagen-based products. In this context, this work aims to overview the properties of equine collagen making it particularly appealing in medicine, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, as well as its main biomedical applications and the currently approved equine collagen-based medical devices, focusing on experimental studies and clinical trials of the last 15 years. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first review focusing on the use of equine collagen, as well as on equine collagen-based marketed products for healthcare.

Keywords: biomaterials; equine; medical devices; type I collagen.

Figure 1

Taxonomy and sequence homology of selected mammalian collagen compared to human collagen. Identity percentages esteemed by collagen sequence alignment evaluation of α1 and α2 chains of equine, bovine, rodents, avian, swine and ovine in comparison with human collagen, by mean of UniProt (https://www.uniprot.org/align/) sequence alignment bioinformatic tool (last accessed on 3 April 2020).

Figure 2

Global consumption of equine meat per year. Worldwide slaughtered horses (line) for the production of horse meat (dot) for human consumption per year. Data obtained from Food and Agriculture Organization Corporate Statistical Database (FAOSTAT) (http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data) on-line information system (last accessed on 10 July 2020).

Figure 3

Typical uses of equine collagen-based products in biomedical applications. Equine collagen-based products are usually used as hemostatic agent (A), wound dressing (B), matrix for soft (C) and hard (D) tissues regeneration. Black arrows in section (A) and (B) indicate the trigger of the hemostasis process and the healing of wounds pathway by mean of equine collagen substrates, respectively. Black arrows in section (C) and (D) represent the equine collagen matrix-mediated enhancement of soft and hard tissues regeneration process, respectively.