Potential of Secretome - Hydrogel Based to Accelerate Bone Regeneration in Periodontitis: A Bioinformatics Approach

Periodontitis can cause alveolar bone resorption. The secretome of stem cells from exfoliated primary teeth (SHED) contains TGF-β, which can stimulate osteogenesis in bone regeneration. Chitosan (CS)/β-glycerophosphate (BGP)/Hydroxyapatite (HA) based hydrogels have good biocompatibility. The research aims to predict the potential for adding a secretome to a hydrogel base by analysing protein-protein interactions (PPI) and binding interactions with several protein factors related to bone regeneration. The interaction and annotation of secretome with bone regeneration-related periodontitis were explored using BioGRID 4.4 data. The interaction analysis of CS/BGP/HA hydrogels was performed using DAVID, while for the PPI analysis, both SHED secretome and CS/BGP/HA hydrogels were analysed using STRING V.11.55 (https://string-db.org/). The molecular docking was performed using Autodock Vina integrated with Pyrx v.09.8. The results of the PPI analysis showed that BMP-2 was included in the top MCODE clustering. It was observed that TGF-β could activate BMP-2 with a prediction score of 0.8, indicating high confidence. Molecular docking results show that CS/BGP/HA ligands can interact individually with BMP-2, but their binding energies are lower than the threshold of -7 kcal/mol. Adding secretome to hydrogel can potentially increase bone regeneration through its binding interaction with BMP-2.