Recently, artificial intelligence research has driven the development of stretchable and flexible electronic systems. Conductive hydrogels are a class of soft electronic materials that have emerging applications in wearable and implantable biomedical devices. However, current conductive hydrogels possess fundamental limitations in terms of their antibacterial performance and a mechanical mismatch with human tissues, which severely limits their applications in biological interfaces. Here, inspired by animal skin, a conductive hydrogel is fabricated from a supramolecular assembly of polydopamine decorated silver nanoparticles (PDA@Ag NPs), polyaniline, and polyvinyl alcohol, namely PDA@Ag NPs/CPHs. The resultant hydrogel has many desirable features, such as tunable mechanical and electrochemical properties, eye‐catching processability, good self‐healing ability as well as repeatable adhesiveness. Remarkably, PDA@Ag NPs/CPHs exhibit broad antibacterial activity against Gram‐negative and Gram‐positive bacteria. The potential application of this versatile hydrogel is demonstrated by monitoring large‐scale movements of the human body in real time. In addition, PDA@Ag NPs/CPHs have a significant therapeutic effect on diabetic foot wounds by promoting angiogenesis, accelerating collagen deposition, inhibiting bacterial growth, and controlling wound infection. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first time that conductive hydrogels with antibacterial ability are developed for use as epidermal sensors and diabetic foot wound dressing.
Tissue
engineering is a promising and revolutionary strategy to
treat patients who suffer the loss or failure of an organ or tissue,
with the aim to restore the dysfunctional tissues and enhance life
expectancy. Supramolecular adhesive hydrogels are emerging as appealing
materials for tissue engineering applications owing to their favorable
attributes such as tailorable structure, inherent flexibility, excellent
biocompatibility, near-physiological environment, dynamic mechanical
strength, and particularly attractive self-adhesiveness. In this review,
the key design principles and various supramolecular strategies to
construct adhesive hydrogels are comprehensively summarized. Thereafter,
the recent research progress regarding their tissue engineering applications,
including primarily dermal tissue repair, muscle tissue repair, bone
tissue repair, neural tissue repair, vascular tissue repair, oral
tissue repair, corneal tissue repair, cardiac tissue repair, fetal
membrane repair, hepatic tissue repair, and gastric tissue repair,
is systematically highlighted. Finally, the scientific challenges
and the remaining opportunities are underlined to show a full picture
of the supramolecular adhesive hydrogels. This review is expected
to offer comparative views and critical insights to inspire more advanced
studies on supramolecular adhesive hydrogels and pave the way for
different fields even beyond tissue engineering applications.
Stem cell transplantation is a promising alternative therapy for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients, with the potential to suppress autoimmune inflammation and prevent joint damage. However, widespread application of RA therapy based on stem cell transplantation is limited due to poor migration, local retention, and uncontrolled differentiation of stem cells. Here, inspired by the dynamic construction of bone matrix, a structurally and functionally optimized scaffold for loading bone marrow stem cells (BMSCs) is designed to aid RA management. The composite scaffolds consist of stiff 3D printing porous metal scaffolds (3DPMS) and soft multifunctional polysaccharide hydrogels, wherein 3DPMS meet the requirements for large-scale bone defects caused by RA. Attractively, the fabricated hydrogels on the composite scaffold are self-healable, injectable, biocompatible, and biodegradable, which endow the resultant scaffold many aspects mimicking the extracellular matrix (ECM). After encapsulation of BMSCs, hydrogels are administered into the inner pores of 3DPMS, abbreviated as BMSCs@3DPMS/hydrogels. In this study, BMSCs@3DPMS/hydrogels have a good effect on improving RA, such as remodeling of knee joint articular cartilage, inhibition of inflammatory cytokines, and promotion of subchondral bone regeneration. Besides RA, the innovative scaffolds may also serve as an ideal biomaterial for other bone regenerative therapies in various orthopedic diseases.
The ingenious construction of versatile cancer phototheranostics involving fluorescence imaging (FLI) and photodynamic and photothermal therapies (PDT, PTT) concurrently has attracted great interest. By virtue of their inherent twisted structures and plentiful motion moieties, aggregation‐induced emission luminogens (AIEgens) have been proven to be perfect templates for the development of multimodal phototheranostic systems as their diverse energy consumption pathways can be flexibly regulated through tuning the intramolecular motions. Side‐chain engineering is generally accepted as a useful regulation strategy for intramolecular motions through altering the side‐chain structure of the molecule, but has rarely been reported for the construction of AIE‐active multimodal phototheranostics. Herein, by taking full advantage of the side‐chain engineering strategy, an AIE‐active multifunctional phototheranostic system (TBFT2 nanoparticles) is successfully constructed by intentionally manipulating the length of side chains. Bearing the longest alkyl chain, all of those three energy dissipation pathways including radiative decay, nonradiative thermal deactivation, and intersystem crossing process of TBFT2 are retained simultaneously and controllably in the aggregate state. In vitro and in vivo evaluations verify that TBFT2 nanoparticles perform well in terms of FLI‐guided PDT and PTT synergistic cancer therapy. This study thus provides new insight into the exploration of superior versatile phototheranostics through side‐chain engineering.
Surface state-controlled C-dots/C-dots based dual-emission fluorescent nanothermometer is achieved which can use for the visual measurement of intracellular temperature variations.
A fast, sensitive, and convenient dual-emission water detector was robustly fabricated. This detector was prepared with blue fluorescent carbon dots (CDs) and red fluorescent Cu nanoclusters (NCs), and showed two well-resolved and intensity-comparable fluorescence peaks under a single excitation wavelength. Moreover, it showed strong red fluorescence in organic solvent due to the aggregation-induced emission enhancement (AIEE) properties of the Cu NCs, but the red fluorescence was gradually quenched with an increasing amount of water, whereas the blue fluorescence remained constant. The differences in response result in a continuous fluorescence color change from red to blue that can be clearly observed by the naked eye. Thus, as-prepared Cu NC-based dual-emission nanomaterials can be used for ratiometric fluorescence detection of trace amounts of water in organic solvents by taking advantage of the water sensitivity of their fluorescence intensity ratios (red/blue) and their low detect limits (<0.02% v/v). These studies demonstrate that a novel and sensitive dual-emission ratiometric water detector has been found, which shows promise for application in environmental monitoring, food inspection, and life science.
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