Micromotors have opened novel avenues for drug delivery due to their capacity for self-propelling. Attempts in this field trend towards ameliorating their functions to promote their clinical applications. In this paper, an ingenious suction-cup-inspired micromotor is presented with adhesive properties for drug delivery in the stomach. The micromotors are fabricated by using hydrogel replicating the structure of suction-cup-like microparticles, which derive from self-assembly of colloidal crystals under rapid solvent extraction, followed by loading magnesium (Mg) in the bottom spherical surface. The Mg-loaded micromotors can realize spontaneous movement due to the continual generation of hydrogen bubbles in gastric juice. The combination of unique suction-cup-like structure with excellent motion performance makes the micromotor an ideal carrier for drug delivery as they can efficiently adhere to the tissue. Moreover, benefiting from the porous structure, the hydrogel micromotors exhibit a high volume-surface ratio, which enables efficient drug loading. It is demonstrated that the suction-cup-inspired micromotors can adhere efficiently to the ulcer-region in the stomach and release drugs due to their distinctive architecture and spontaneous motion, exhibiting desirable curative effect of gastric ulcer. Thus, the suction-cup-inspired micromotors with adhesive properties are expected to advance the development of micromotor in clinical applications.
Blood purification by adsorption of excessive biomolecules is vital for maintaining human health. Here, inspired by kidney self‐purification, which removes a number of biomolecules with different sizes simultaneously, hierarchical molecular‐imprinted inverse opal particles integrated with a herringbone microfluidic chip for efficient biomolecules cleaning are presented. The particle possesses combinative porous structure with both surface and interior imprints for the specific recognition of small molecules and biomacromolecules. Additionally, the presence of the herringbone mixer largely improve the adsorption efficiency due to enhanced mixing. Moreover, the inverse opal framework of the particles give rise to optical sensing ability for self‐reporting of the adsorption states. These features, together with its reusability, biosafety, and biocompatibility, make the platform highly promising for clinical blood purification and artificial kidney construction.
Information security occupies an important position in the era of big data. Attempts to improve the security performance tend to impart them with more additional encryption strategies. Herein, inspired by the wettability feature of Stenocara beetle elytra and signal model of traffic light, a novel array of perovskite nanocrystals (PNs)‐integrated PhC microsphere for information security is presented. The photoluminescent PNs are encapsulated in angle‐independent PhC microspheres to impart them with binary optical signals as coding information. Through the multimask superposition approach, PNs‐integrated PhC microspheres with different codes are placed into fluorosilane‐treated PDMS substrate to form different arrays. These arrays could converge moisture on PhC microspheres in wet environment, which avoids the ions loss of the PNs and effectively prevented mutual contamination. In addition, the fluorescence of the PNs inside PhC microspheres could reversibly quench or recover in response to the environmental moisture. Based on these features, it is demonstrated that the PNs‐integrated PhC microsphere arrays could realize various information encryption modes, which indicate their excellent values in information security fields.
As a fundamental feature of solid surfaces, wettability is playing an increasingly important role in our daily life. Benefitting from the inspiration of biological paradigms and the development in manufacturing technology, numerous wettability materials with elaborately designed surface topology and chemical compositions have been fabricated. Based on these advances, wettability materials have found broad technological implications in various fields ranging from academy, industry, agriculture to biomedical engineering. Among them, the practical applications of wettability materials in biomedical-related fields are receiving remarkable researches during the past decades because of the increasing attention to healthcare. In this review, the research progress of materials with specific wettability is discussed. After briefly introducing the underlying mechanisms, the fabrication strategies of artificial materials with specific wettability are described. The emphasis is put on the application progress of wettability biomaterials in biomedical engineering. The prospects for the future trend of wettability materials are also presented.
In the drug therapy of tumor, efficient and stable drug screening platforms are required since the drug efficacy varies individually. Here, inspired by the microstructures of hepatic lobules, in which hepatocytes obtain nutrients from both capillary vessel and the central vein, we present a novel hierarchical hydrogel system with ordered micro-nano structure for liver cancer-on-a-chip construction and drug screening. The hierarchical hydrogel system was fabricated by using pregel to fill and replicate self-assembled colloidal crystal arrays and microcolumn array template. Due to the synergistic effect of its interconnected micro-nano structures, the resultant system could not only precisely control the size of cell spheroids but also realize adequate nutrient supply of cell spheroids. We have demonstrated that by integrating the hierarchical hydrogel system into a multichannel concentration gradients microfluidic chip, a functional liver cancer-on-a-chip could be constructed for high-throughput drug screening with good repeatability and high accuracy. These results indicated that the hierarchical hydrogel system and its derived liver cancer-on-a-chip are ideal platforms for drug screening and have great application potential in the field of personalized medicine.
Microfluidic detection methods for cell deformability cytometry have been regarded as powerful tools for single‐cell analysis of cellular mechanical phenotypes, thus having been widely applied in the fields of cell preparation, separation, clinical diagnostics and so on. Featured with traits like easy operations, low cost and high throughput, such methods have shown great potentials on investigating physiological state and pathological changes during cellular deformation. Herein, a review on the advancements of microfluidic‐based cell deformation cytometry is presented. We discuss several representative microfluidic‐based cell deformability cytometry methods with their frontiers in practical applications. Finally, we analyze the current status and propose the remaining challenges with future perspectives and development directions.
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