Programmable Degradation of Transient Soluble Silk Based Optical Devices via Thermal Nanoimprinting

We report a facile patterning technique for precise controlling the degradation of silk protein based optical micro devices by rapid thermal nanoimprinting for transient applications. The solubility of silk films strongly depends on the crystalline conformation of the silk proteins, which can be well tuned by the spatial and temporal modification during thermal treatment. Compared with the previous methods, this approach mainly focuses on the customizing the degradation order and rate of multiple-drug-loaded soluble silk optics for programmable drug release and real-time monitoring via optical read-out. It opens up opportunities for manufacturing high-performance transient devices with programmable degradation rates.