Self-Healing Gel Opens Door to Tissue Engineering

Jan-14-16 Researchers have created a self-healing “extreme gel” that could open the door to new developments in tissue engineering.

Although there are other “self-healing” materials already available, they can tend to leak their healing liquid when cracked, and lack the desired flexibility for tissue research. To overcome this obstacle, the team from Rice University created the self-adaptive composite (SAC) by containing the liquid in tiny spheres, which they made combining two polymers and a solvent. When the mass is heated, the solvent evaporates, resulting in a porous mass of “gooey spheres” that will allow the material to heal itself repeatedly as well as return to its original shape after being compressed.

According to Jun Lou, “The sample doesn’t give you the impression that it contains any liquid. That’s very different from a gel. This is not really squishy; it’s more like a sugar cube that you can compress quite a lot. The nice thing is that it recovers.”

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[MEDGADGET.COM]
[NEWS.RICE.EDU]

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