Abstract
Purpose : As a series of transitions in the development of amino acid-based drugs over 50 years in Japan, the histories of collagen studies in the medical field and the development of collagen-based medical devices are investigated in this paper.
Method : The authors use the Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency (PMDA) search engine for package inserts of medical devices and literature.
Results and Conclusion : The feature of collagen structure had been clarified from the 1930’s. In 1960, Japanese scientists discovered a pepsin solubilized collagen. Since then, the collagen has been used for a variety of purposes and in many forms, including more than thirty medical devices launched between the 1970’s and 2020’s in Japan. In recent years, the collagen has been used for not only cell transplantation carriers, but also the scaffold of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).
