Multifaceted Design and Emerging Applications of Tissue Adhesives

Abstract

Tissue adhesives can form appreciable adhesion with tissues and have found clinical use in a variety of medical settings such as wound closure, surgical sealants, regenerative medicine, and device attachment. The advantages of tissue adhesives include ease of implementation, rapid application, mitigation of tissue damage, and compatibility with minimally invasive procedures. The field of tissue adhesives is rapidly evolving, leading to tissue adhesives with superior mechanical properties and advanced functionality. Such adhesives enable new applications ranging from mobile health to cancer treatment. To provide guidelines for the rational design of tissue adhesives, here, existing strategies for tissue adhesives are synthesized into a multifaceted design, which comprises three design elements: the tissue, the adhesive surface, and the adhesive matrix. The mechanical, chemical, and biological considerations associated with each design element are reviewed. Throughout the report, the limitations of existing tissue adhesives and immediate opportunities for improvement are discussed. The recent progress of tissue adhesives in topical and implantable applications is highlighted, and then future directions toward next‐generation tissue adhesives are outlined. The development of tissue adhesives will fuse disciplines and make broad impacts in engineering and medicine.

Skin-like hydrogel devices for wearable sensing, soft robotics and beyond

“…In summary, in this section we mainly introduced several strategies to realize tough and strong adhesion between hydrogel and various substrates including metal, plastics, glass, ceramics, PDMS, Ecoflex, VHB, and tissues. Readers can refer to other review articles for more details ( Lee et al., 2018a ; Li et al., 2021 ; Ma et al., 2021 ; Nam and Mooney, 2021 ; Pei et al., 2021 ; Yang and Suo, 2018 ). While most existing hydrogel adhesives are permanent, novel adhesives designed with on-demand detachability and other functions (e.g., ambient stability, anti-freeze, anti-swell, conductivity, reversibility, and degradability) are needed in many practical applications including wearables, implantables, and robots.…”

Hydrogel adhesive formed via multiple chemical interactions: from persistent wet adhesion to rapid hemostasis

“…23 On a relatively rough surface such as ceramic or stainless steel, its structure is conducive for the penetration of the polymer chains of the hydrogel into the surface pores to form mechanical interlocking and increased contact area, improving the adhesion. 24 Similarly, based on the relatively high roughness of the surface of the skin and myocardium, 25 the adhesion energy of the hydrogel on their surfaces is higher than that of other tissue substrates. After immersion in PBS for 4 days, the adhesion energy of the hydrogel matrix to various surfaces decreased compared with that in a dry environment.…”

Redox and conductive underwater adhesive: an innovative electrode material for convenient construction of flexible and stretchable supercapacitors

“…Underwater adhesives secreted by marine organisms have long been known to exhibit exceptional adhesion capability, and adaptive and deformable features under the water line or highly humid conditions. [20][21][22][23][24] Drawing inspiration from these features of underwater adhesives, we sought to exploit a kind of adhesive electrode coating simultaneously carrying redox activity and conduction to improve interfacial adhesion as well as the reliability of exible SCs.…”