Hydrogels

In search of advanced medical devices that can be ingested by the human body and don’t need to be surgically removed after, scientists at MIT have developed a new technology that would instead break them down by exposure to certain kinds of light.

Medicine, soft robotics and wearable electronics are just a few of the fields that could benefit from a new hydrogel that's applied to the body. The transparent material can sense when it's being touched, bent, heated, or otherwise manipulated.

Scientists in Australia have made a big breakthrough in regenerative medicine, developing a hydrogel that acts as a “sanctuary” for transplanted stem cells in the brain, giving them the smooth start they need to survive in their new environment.

Scientists in Australia have developed a jelly-like material with many of the properties of living tissue. A form of a hydrogel, it is self-healing, very strong and can change its shape – allowing it to mimic skin, ligaments, and bone.

Hokkaido University’s ongoing research into hydrogels has borne fresh fruit: a new polymer-based material that, unlike other polymers, hardens when heated – by 1,800 times.

Slapping on a Band-Aid is the easiest way to help a cut on your skin heal, but things aren’t so simple for internal wounds. Now, researchers from Harvard have developed spray-on hydrogels, produced by bacteria, that can help heal these internal wounds.

​The most numerous of organisms on Earth, bacteriophages are viruses that infect and kill bacteria. Now, scientists have grown enough of them to create a self-healing hydrogel that's made almost entirely of the things. It could have important applications in medicine, and in other fields.

​With a few experimental exceptions, bandages generally just cover wounds, as opposed to actively healing them. That's not the case with a new heat-activated "active adhesive dressing" (AAD), however, which forgoes antibiotics while mimicking embryonic skin.

A patient’s immune system can often react badly to bone marrow transplants. Mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) may help, but they too can be cleared out by immune cells. Now, a Harvard team has shown that coating MSCs in a thin hydrogel can protect them, making bone marrow transplants more successful.

In many arid coastal regions, a great quantity of fresh water is lost into the atmosphere every day, as it evaporates from the ocean. This situation prompted scientists to create a new hydrogel that's highly effective at capturing moisture from the sea air, and then releasing it as fresh water.

Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have demonstrated a prototype of a drug that can release three active ingredients, at different times in sequence. The key to this unusual and useful ointment is artificial DNA, which breaks down at precise intervals.

Although it may be hard to believe that there is already an "established" method of doing something such as 3D-printing biological tissue, there does indeed seem to be one. It utilizes microscale scaffolds – which a newly-developed technique does away with the need for.