I doubt there is any serious work beeing done in that direction. The main problem with fingerprints is that you leave them literally everywhere. Every glass you use could be used to gather your fingerprints. You would end up with a private key which is only protected by a password. We already got that, its called a brainwallet.
That makes sense, it definitely isnt a safe way to store a private key. I was trying to think about someway to store a private key without the need of writing things somewhere(that can get lost) or of
remembering long paraphrases.I don't think that people realize that this is actually a very bad idea. You could get amnesia, some form of dementia e.g. early onset Alzheimer's.
As for OP using a fingerprint is not safe. You leave so many fingerprints everywhere. One could easily follow you and extract one (if you live in a crowded city) without you noticing it.