US Patent Issued to Trustees of Tufts College on June 17 for "Compression and heat-assisted production of silk-based materials" (Massachusetts Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,331,429, issued on June 17, was assigned to Trustees of Tufts College (Medford, Mass.).

"Compression and heat-assisted production of silk-based materials" was invented by David L. Kaplan (Concord, Mass.), Fiorenzo G. Omenetto (Lexington, Mass.), Chunmei Li (Stoneham, Mass.) and Chengchen Guo (Wakefield, Mass.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "In some embodiments, the present disclosure provides methods including the steps of (i) providing silk fibroin material comprising substantially amorphous structure, and (ii) applying at least one of elevated temperature and elevated pressure to the silk fibroin material to form a silk fibroin article,...