02.17.23
US Patent No. 11,576,862 B2 (David L. Kaplan, Tuna Yucel, Xiaoqin Wang, Michael Lovett); Tufts College, Medford, MA, has been awarded a US patent for a method of preparing a silk microsphere. It entails atomizing a silk solution into individual droplets to form silk microspheres with a diameter of at least 50 μm; freezing the silk microspheres, and lyophilizing the silk microspheres to form porous silk microspheres that have a porosity of at least 30%.