Self‐Healing Hydrogels: The Next Paradigm Shift in Tissue Engineering?

Abstract

Given their durability and long‐term stability, self‐healable hydrogels have, in the past few years, emerged as promising replacements for the many brittle hydrogels currently being used in preclinical or clinical trials. To this end, the incompatibility between hydrogel toughness and rapid self‐healing remains unaddressed, and therefore most of the self‐healable hydrogels still face serious challenges within the dynamic and mechanically demanding environment of human organs/tissues. Furthermore, depending on the target tissue, the self‐healing hydrogels must comply with a wide range of properties including electrical, biological, and mechanical. Notably, the incorporation of nanomaterials into double‐network hydrogels is showing great promise as a feasible way to generate self‐healable hydrogels with the above‐mentioned attributes. Here, the recent progress in the development of multifunctional and self‐healable hydrogels for various tissue engineering applications is discussed in detail. Their potential applications within the rapidly expanding areas of bioelectronic hydrogels, cyborganics, and soft robotics are further highlighted.

Liquid Metal–Based Soft Microfluidics

“…In the most recent studies, the self‐healing of LM‐based devices not only include the recovery of the electronic properties after damage, but also contains the recovery of the mechanical toughness and restretchability which is mainly depend on the encapsulating polymer materials . As introduced in the section of 2D flexible electronics (Section 5.3), the LM‐encapsulated sulfur polymer shows excellent self‐healing properties in both the mechanical and electrical performance under mild conditions .…”

Self‐healing Polyol/Borax Hydrogels: Fabrications, Properties and Applications

“…In addition to simplicity, it affords hydrogels with pH-and thermo-sensitive behaviors which can be useful candidates for biomedical applications. While detailed reviews have been published about self-healing hydrogels, [27][28][29][30] the borax-based self-healing hydrogels, to the best of our knowledge, have been seldom reviewed.…”

Reactivation of atrium genes is a primer for heart infarction or regeneration

“…The notion that it might be possible to rebuild the cardiac muscle paves the way of new concept, heart regeneration, which is one of the most active and controversial areas of biomedical research. Physician scientists at the bench-side propose three strategies, including cell-based therapy 1,2 , bioengineering methods 3,4 and synthetic organogenesis [5][6][7] .…”