A Pressure-Sensitive Bioadhesive for Wet Tissues and Organs

Abstract

Pressure-sensitive adhesives (PSAs) have been a workhorse in diverse applications from the repair of objects to heavy-duty industrial use due to their unique capability to form near-instant and robust yet repeatable adhesion to a wide range of engineering solids via physical bonding. While these characteristics of PSAs are highly favorable in various biomedical applications, commercial PSAs lack adhesion to wet tissue surfaces. Moreover, existing bioadhesives are mostly limited to single-use applications incapable of repeated adhesion and repositioning due to the irreversible nature of chemical adhesion. In this work, we introduce a pressure-sensitive bioadhesive (PSB) that synergistically combines the advantages of viscoelastic PSAs and bioadhesives. Enabled by a one-pot scalable copolymerization of a poly(glycerol sebacate)-co-poly(ethylene glycol) (PGS-co-PEG) block copolymer, the PSB provides near-instant (~ 1 s), robust, and repeatable (over 1,000 times) adhesion to wet biological tissues (i.e., skin, lung, heart) and engineering (i.e., metals, plastics) substrates without prior surface functionalization. We further demonstrate in vitro and in vivo biocompatibility and biodegradability of the PSB and its potential applications as a surgical sealant and the rapid, robust, and repositionable integration of biomedical devices with wet dynamic organs in rat and porcine models.