New hydrogel for tissue repair

Hydrogels are often used as scaffolds in tissue engineering . Living cells infused into the material can, theoretically, grow through the gel until an entire piece of tissue forms. But to grow well, cells need to interact with one another. Unfortunately, traditional hydrogel scaffolds don’t allow much cell-to-cell interaction. Granular hydrogels could overcome this issue. Granular hydrogels are composed of many micrometer-sized subunits that are simply packed together, said Jason Burdick , a bioengineer at the University of Colorado Boulder. In part of a presentation given at the ACS Fall 2024 meeting, Burdick discussed the work of graduate student Nikolas Di Caprio, which leverages the unique properties of granular hydrogels to bioengineer cartilage tissue. The trick, Burdick told C&EN, is to mix clusters of cells into the granular hydrogel to make a composite material ( Adv. Mater. 2024, DOI: 10.1002 /adma.202312226 ). This allows the cells to interact with one