Smart soft contact lenses for continuous 24-hour monitoring of intraocular pressure in glaucoma care.

Continuous monitoring of intraocular pressure, particularly during sleep, remains a grand challenge in glaucoma care. Here we introduce a class of smart soft contact lenses, enabling the continuous 24-hour monitoring of intraocular pressure, even during sleep. Uniquely, the smart soft contact lenses are built upon various commercial brands of soft contact lenses without altering their intrinsic properties such as lens power, biocompatibility, softness, transparency, wettability, oxygen transmissibility, and overnight wearability.

Rapid custom prototyping of soft poroelastic biosensor for simultaneous epicardial recording and imaging.

The growing need for the implementation of stretchable biosensors in the body has driven rapid prototyping schemes through the direct ink writing of multidimensional functional architectures. Recent approaches employ biocompatible inks that are dispensable through an automated nozzle injection system. However, their application in medical practices remains challenged in reliable recording due to their viscoelastic nature that yields mechanical and electrical hysteresis under periodic large strains.

Zwitterionic liquid crystalline polythiophene as an antibiofouling biomaterial.

To address a key challenge of conjugated polymers in biomedical applications having poor antifouling properties that eventually leads to the failure and reduced lifetime of bioelectronics in the body, herein we describe the design, synthesis, and evaluation of our newly designed multifunctional zwitterionic liquid crystalline polymer PCBTh-C8C10, which is facilely synthesized using oxidative polymerization. A conjugated polythiophene backbone, a multifunctional zwitterionic side chain, and a mesogenic unit are integrated into one segment. By DSC and POM characterization, we verify that the introduction of 3,5-bis(2-octyl-1-dodecyloxy)benzene as a mesogenic unit into the polythiophene backbone allows the formation of the liquid crystalline mesophase of the resulting polymer.

Zwitterionic Porous Conjugated Polymers as a Versatile Platform for Antibiofouling Implantable Bioelectronics.

Here, we describe the design, synthesis, and evaluation of two kinds of multifunctional zwitterionic linear poly(carboxybetaine thiophene) (PCBTh) and porous poly(carboxybetaine thiophene--9,9'-bifluoreneylidene) (PCBTh-BF) polymers, which can be facilely synthesized using Yamamoto and Suzuki polycondensation, respectively. The integrations of zwitterionic polymer-based biomaterials that consist of conjugated polymer backbones, multifunctional zwitterionic side chains, and distorted units are designed and studied to address a key challenge of conjugated polymers in biomedical applications: biofouling phenomena that eventually lead to the failure and reduced lifetime of bioelectronics in the body. The introduction of a twisting unit into the polymer backbone allows us to tune the porosity, morphology, optical properties, and efficiency of antibiofouling features of resulting polymers.

One-Step Large-Scale Nanotexturing of Nonplanar PTFE Surfaces to Induce Bactericidal and Anti-inflammatory Properties.

Here we demonstrate a simple and scalable nanotexturing method for both planar (films) and nonplanar (tubes) polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) surfaces using a commercial desktop oxygen plasma etcher. The simple process can generate semiordered nanopillar structures on both tubular and planar samples with high radial and axial uniformity. We found that the resulting surfaces exhibit good bactericidal and anti-inflammatory properties.