Miraculous self healing hydrogel: high strength, antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties

Recently, high strength self repairing hydrogels have potential applications in the replacement and reconstruction of soft support tissues High strength hydrogels have attracted extensive attention in the field of materials As an implantable device or scaffold, the material itself is required not to cause the human body's xenophobic response The key step to achieve this is to endow the implant with antibacterial and anti-inflammatory functions Professor Liu Wenguang of Tianjin University has developed an implantable supramolecular hydrogel with antibacterial, anti-inflammatory and high mechanical strength The related research results are published online in macromol Rapid commun Two monomers, n-acryloylglycamide (Naga) and 1-vinyl-1,2,4-triazole (vtz), were copolymerized without adding any other crosslinking agent Hydrogen bond was formed between the Naga structures on the branch chain of the polymer, which played the role of physical connection point Triazole structure showed a variety of biological activities, including antibacterial, antihypertensive, analgesic and so on Fig 1: a schematic diagram of self healing hydrogels The synergistic effect of hydrogen bonds and VTZ in polymer structure makes the hydrogel material possess many excellent properties The structure of VTZ reduced the strong hydrogen bonding force between PNAGA, and more water molecules could enter into the gel network The equilibrium water content (EWCs) of PNAGA-PVTZ hydrogel could reach 81%-92% Even when EWCs reaches 92.3%, the mechanical strength of hydrogels does not decrease, and hydrogel can still withstand knots, stretching and compression without any damage Fig 2: the effect of the ratio of two monomers in the copolymer PNAGA-PVTZ hydrogel on the mechanical properties of hydrogels, and the effect of pH on the properties of hydrogels and the self-healing of hydrogels were explored Even if the water gel is dried or chopped, the hydrogel can still restore its original state Figure 3: mechanical properties and self-healing properties of hydrogels, the authors expect that the mature PNAGA-PVTZ hydrogel materials can be used as an injectable hydrogel scaffold for various biomedical engineering projects Paper information: a high strength self healableantibial and anti infant polymer hydraulic Hongbo Wang, Hui Zhu, Weigui Fu, Yinyu Zhang, Bing Xu, Fei Gao, Zhiqiang Cao, * Wenguang Liu * macromol Rapid Commission 2017, DOI: 10.1002/marc.201600695