Abstract
An ideal hydrogel for biomedical engineering should mimic the intrinsic properties of natural tissue, especially high toughness and self-healing ability, in order to withstand cyclic loading and repair skin and muscle damage. In addition, excellent cell affinity and tissue adhesiveness enable integration with the surrounding tissue after implantation. Inspired by the natural mussel adhesive mechanism, we designed a polydopamine–polyacrylamide (PDA–PAM) single network hydrogel by preventing the overoxidation of dopamine to maintain enough free catechol groups in the hydrogel. Therefore, the hydrogel possesses super stretchability, high toughness, stimuli-free self-healing ability, cell affinity and tissue adhesiveness. More remarkably, the current hydrogel can repeatedly be adhered on/stripped from a variety of surfaces for many cycles without loss of adhesion strength. Furthermore, the hydrogel can serve as an excellent platform to host various nano-building blocks, in which multiple functionalities are integrated to achieve versatile potential applications, such as magnetic and electrical therapies.
Highlights
Hydrogels have a similar structure to biological soft tissues and can be engineered to resemble an extracellular matrix, and have great potential for tissue engineering applications.[1,2,3,4]
Most tough hydrogels lack the ability of natural tissue to self-heal after damage because the covalent sacrificial bonds in the hydrogels cannot re-form when the hydrogels rupture after experiencing large deformation or cyclic loading.[10]
The PDA chains in the PAM network achieved a good balance between non-covalent bonds and covalent bonds in the hydrogel, the main reason for the toughness and self-healing properties. These results demonstrated that even a single network could achieve a tough hydrogel similar to previously reported double network and interpenetration hydrogels
Summary
Hydrogels have a similar structure to biological soft tissues and can be engineered to resemble an extracellular matrix, and have great potential for tissue engineering applications.[1,2,3,4] Generally, hydrogels are brittle because of the high water content in the polymer networks, and it is a grand challenge to develop biomimetic hydrogels with superior mechanical properties.[5]. We designed a mussel-inspired, highly tough polydopamine– polyacrylamide (PDA–PAM) hydrogel with superior self-healing ability, excellent cell affinity and tissue adhesiveness.
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