Spider Silk

Web-Enabled Medical Applications & More

Randy Lewis, USTAR professor and Synthetic Bio-manufacturing Center team member, is finding novel ways to produce  large quantities of spider silk proteins for applications in multi-billion dollar markets.

Some applications are:

  • Medical devices and equipment
  • Technical fabrics

Medical: There are more than 100,000 ligament repair and replacement surgeries in the United States each year. Spider silk–based synthetic ligaments and sutures may one day play an important role in this market.

Technical fabrics: The exceptional flexibility, strength and weight of spider silk make it a potentially ideal material for products such as vehicular airbags and high-performance sports apparel.

Spiders are impossible to raise at a commercially viable scale. As a solution, Lewis and his team have created a line of transgenic goats that produce spider silk proteins in goat milk and transgenic silk worms that incorporate spider silk proteins into their cocoons.