The ideal material for interfacing electronics with living tissue is soft, stretchable, and just as water-loving as the tissue itself: in short, a hydrogel.
Meanwhile, semiconductors—the key materials for bioelectronics such as pacemakers, biosensors, and drug delivery devices—are traditionally known to be rigid, brittle, and water-hating.
A paper published in Science from the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering has solved this challenge that has long stymied researchers. The result is a bluish gel that flutters like a sea jelly in water, but retains the immense semiconductive ability needed to transmit information between living tissue and machine.
This means their material—both semiconductor and hydrogel at the same time—ticks all the boxes for an ideal bioelectronic interface.
“When making implantable bioelectronic devices, one challenge you must address is to make a device with tissue-like mechanical properties,” said Yahao Dai, the first author of the new paper. “That way, when it gets directly interfaced with the tissue, they can deform together and also form a very intimate bio-interface.”
Although the paper mainly focused on the challenges facing implanted medical devices such as biochemical sensors and pacemakers, Dai said the material also has many potential non-surgical applications, like better readings off the skin or improved care for wounds.
“It has very soft mechanical properties and a large degree of hydration similar to living tissue,” said UChicago PME Asst. Prof. Sihong Wang, whose lab led the research. “Hydrogel is also very porous, so it allows the efficient diffusion transport of different kinds of nutrition and chemicals.
“All these traits combine to make hydrogel probably the most useful material for tissue engineering and drug delivery.”
—Prof. Jacqueline Stewart
