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Updated: May 23, 2025
Designing Silk-silk Protein Alloy Materials for Biomedical Applications
Published on: August 13, 2014
Multifunctional Silk Fibroin Hydrogels with Strong Adhesion for Tissue Sealing and Wearable Electronic Sensors
Xinling Hu1, Jitian Chen1, Zijian Yan1
1Research Institution for Biomimetics and Soft Matter, The Higher Educational Key Laboratory for Biomedical Engineering of Fujian Province, Research Center of Biomedical Engineering of Xiamen, Fujian Key Laboratory of Advanced Materials, Department of Biomaterials, College of Materials, Shenzhen Research Institute of Xiamen University, Xiamen University, 422 Siming Nan Road, Xiamen 361005, People's Republic of China.
Abstract:
Multifunctional hydrogels with excellent adhesion, biodegradability, and conductivity are essential for overcoming the obstacles of postoperative secondary injury, flexible sensing instability, and so on. Herein, we develop a multifunctional silk fibroin (SF) hydrogel modified with poly(acrylic acid). Owing to the stable chemical cross-linking network and the abundant carboxylic acid groups of the SF network, the SF hydrogel exhibits a high tensile strength of 74.34 kPa due to sufficient cohesion and interfacial interactions. Additionally, the tensile strain reaches a maximum of 414.6%, the compressive strength is 0.9 MPa, and the shear adhesive strength for pig skin tissues is as high as 64 kPa. Compared with most hydrogels, our multifunctional SF hydrogel with a low swelling ratio provides excellent adhesion, biodegradation, and conductivity, which shows advantages in terms of invasive tissue sealing. The use of self-adhesive SF hydrogels as conductive hydrogels in flexible sensors also benefits the collection of physiological electricity and human motion signals in the field of wearable and implantable electronic devices.
