Issue 6, 2023

Chemical signal regulated injectable coacervate hydrogels

Abstract

In the quest for stimuli-responsive materials with specific, controllable functions, coacervate hydrogels have become a promising candidate, featuring sensitive responsiveness to environmental signals enabling control over sol–gel transitions. However, conventional coacervation-based materials are regulated by relatively non-specific signals, such as temperature, pH or salt concentration, which limits their possible applications. In this work, we constructed a coacervate hydrogel with a Michael addition-based chemical reaction network (CRN) as a platform, where the state of coacervate materials can be easily tuned by specific chemical signals. We designed a pyridine-based ABA triblock copolymer, whose quaternization can be regulated by an allyl acetate electrophile and an amine nucleophile, leading to gel construction and collapse in the presence of polyanions. Our coacervate gels showed not only highly tunable stiffness and gelation times, but excellent self-healing ability and injectability with different sized needles, and accelerated degradation resulting from chemical signal-induced coacervation disruption. This work is expected to be a first step in the realization of a new class of signal-responsive injectable materials.

Graphical abstract: Chemical signal regulated injectable coacervate hydrogels

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Edge Article
Submitted
19 Dec 2022
Accepted
23 Dec 2022
First published
19 Jan 2023
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Chem. Sci., 2023,14, 1512-1523

Chemical signal regulated injectable coacervate hydrogels

B. Wu, R. W. Lewis, G. Li, Y. Gao, B. Fan, B. Klemm, J. Huang, J. Wang, M. A. Cohen Stuart and R. Eelkema, Chem. Sci., 2023, 14, 1512 DOI: 10.1039/D2SC06935K

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