(602a) Designing Tough and Elastic Conductive Bioadhesive Hydrogel for Tissue Engineering and Biosensing

Hydrogels have been extensively used for various biomedical applications, ranging from tissue engineering to matrices for drug delivery, as well as substrates for biosensing, due to their versatility in structure and physical properties. Although significant progress has been made towards designing hydrogels with tunable properties, engineering tough and elastic hydrogels that resemble native tissue mechano-physical properties is still considered a great challenge. In addition, for many tissue engineering applications as well as biosensing, the conductivity of hydrogels is an important factor. Many attempts have been made to engineer conductive hydrogels through the incorporation of external conductive fillers such as carbon nanotubes, graphene, MXenes, metallic micro/nanoparticles, and intrinsically conductive polymers such as polyaniline and polypyrrole. However, the engineered conductive composites require a high concentration of conductive fillers, leading to inconsistent dispersion and agglomeration, as well as toxicity, limiting their biomedical applications. To address these limitations, our lab has focused on engineering multifunctional naturally-derived hydrogels with combined properties of high toughness, flexibility, adhesion, high elasticity, and conductivity through tuning various molecular interactions among the building blocks of the hydrogel network. In addition, the use of natural polymers as the backbone endows the engineered hydrogels with improved biocompatibility and biodegradability, which have been extensively tested in various in vitro and in vivo models. Due to the tunability of the physio-chemical properties of the engineered hydrogel networks, we have applied them for various applications ranging from tough and ultra-strong tissue adhesives for surgical applications to highly stretchable and conductive flexible sensors for real-time human health monitoring. In this presentation, I will outline our recent works on the design of tough bioadhesive hydrogels for soft tissue sealing and regeneration as well as their application as wearable biosensors.