Construction of high-performance polymer hydrogel composite materials for artificial bionic organs

Abstract Hydrogel, with excellent hydrophilicity biocompatibility and stimuli responsive, has been widely used in biomedical and artificial organs fields. However, synthetic hydrogel usually displays poor gel strength, poor toughness and slow speed of absorbing water. Therefore, extensive exploratory research is still required to develop new composite materials for the application of bionic viscera. In this work, we constructed a new kind of composite hydrogel by a facile wet chemistry method to cross-link three kinds of polymer resin, polyvinyl alcohol, carboxymethyl cellulose, and carboxymethyl starch. The conductivity, moisture content and elastic modulus of hydrogel can be controlled by the dosage of potassium salt, sodium salt, water and glycerol. After molding and testing, the electrical conductivity, elastic modulus, and moisture content of the artificial liver and kidney organs were similar to those of the corresponding pig viscera, which is superior to most of the current research on hydrogels. This work provides a facile approach to synthesize highly efficient hydrogel, which accelerates the application of hydrogel in bionic organs.