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Flexible Hydrogel for Wound Treatment

20.09.2012

A team of experts in mechanics, materials science and tissue engineering at Harvard have created an extremely flexible and durable gel that can be used in a variety of medical procedures, such as replacing damaged cartilage in human joints.

The main ingredient of the new material is water, which is why it is called a hydrogel. This is a hybrid of two fragile gels that together create a special and very useful material. For example, a new hydrogel can be stretched up to 21 times its original length. In addition, it is biocompatible (not rejected by living tissues of the human body), can self-repair and has a lot of other valuable qualities that open up new opportunities in the field of medicine and tissue engineering.

Usually hydrogels are very fragile and break easily - imagine a spoon that easily tears jelly. However, biocompatible water-based gels are very much needed in a number of very complex operations, such as the creation of artificial cartilage or intervertebral discs. But in order to work in the joints, the hydrogel must be very strong and compress / unclench a large number of times without losing its properties. To create such a hydrogel, the scientists combined two polymers: polyacrylamide, which is used in contact lenses and as gel electrophoresis to separate DNA fragments, and a second component, alginate. It is an algae extract that is often used to thicken food.

Separately, these gels are fragile, for example, alginate can only be stretched 1,2 times in length, after which it breaks. However, the connection of two polymers forms a complex network of linked chains that reinforce each other. In this case, the alginate part of the gel consists of polymer chains that form weak ionic bonds with each other, and when the gel is stretched, some of these bonds are broken. As a result, the gel expands slightly, but the polymer chains remain intact.

In turn, polyacrylamide forms chains with a network structure, which are very strongly associated with alginate chains. So if the gel gets tiny cracks during the stretching process, the polyacrylamide network helps spread the traction force over a larger area by "pulling" the alginate's ionic bonds and breaking them in different places. Experiments have shown that the new hydrogel, even with a huge crack, can still stretch up to 17 times its original length.

In addition to creating artificial cartilage, the new hydrogel can be used for "soft" robots, in optics, artificial muscles, as a hard "bandage" for wounds, etc.

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