On the electrical conductivity of alginate hydrogels.

Hydrogels have been extensively used in the field of biomedical applications, offering customizable natural, synthetic or hybrid materials, particularly relevant in the field of tissue engineering. In the bioelectronics discipline, hydrogels are promising mainly as sensing platforms with or without encapsulated cells, showing great potential in healthcare and medicine. However, to date there is little data in the literature which characterizes the electrical properties of tissue engineering materials which are relevant to bioelectronics.

Anisotropic dehydration of hydrogel surfaces.

Efforts to develop tissue-engineered skin for regenerative medicine have explored natural, synthetic, and hybrid hydrogels. The creation of a bilayer material, with the stratification exhibited by native skin, is a complex problem. The mechanically robust, waterproof epidermis presents the stratum corneum at the tissue/air interface, which confers many of these protective properties.

Mechanical properties of alginate hydrogels manufactured using external gelation.

Alginate hydrogels are commonly used in biomedical applications such as scaffolds for tissue engineering, drug delivery, and as a medium for cell immobilisation. Multivalent cations are often employed to create physical crosslinks between carboxyl and hydroxyl moieties on neighbouring polysaccharide chains, creating hydrogels with a range of mechanical properties. This work describes the manufacture and characterisation of sodium alginate hydrogels using the divalent cations Mg(2+), Ca(2+) and Sr(2+) to promote gelation via non-covalent crosslinks.

Effect of plasma surface modification on the biocompatibility of UHMWPE.

In this paper active screen plasma nitriding (ASPN) is used to chemically modify the surface of UHMWPE. This is an unexplored and new area of research. ASPN allows the homogeneous treatment of any shape or surface at low temperature; therefore, it was thought that ASPN would be an effective technique to modify organic polymer surfaces.