Advanced model unlocks granular hydrogel mechanics for biomedical applications

Researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana -Champaign have developed a new framework to understand and control the flow behavior of granular hydrogels – a material of material composed of microscopic particles densely packed with promising applications in medicine, in 3D biopritis and fabrics.

The new study, published in Advanced materialswas led by chemical and biomolecular genius teachers Brendan A. Harley and Simon A. Rogers, whose research groups specialize in the engineering and rheology of biomaterials.

Granular hydrogels have a unique ability to imitate the mechanical properties of living tissue, making them ideal for candidates for encapsulating and delivering cells directly into the body. By integrating the synthesis and characterization of materials with rheological modeling, the researchers have created a predictive model which captures essential physics of the way in which granular hydrogels deform – reducing a complex problem to a few controllable parameters.

“To use granular hydrogels, you must be able to put them inside a body,” said Rogers. “This generally implies a kind of injection or printing process, which means that we must understand how these materials flow and deform – or their rheology. The previous researchers have taken what I would consider as a traditional rheological approach and indicated measures that we know are incomplete and we know that the physics that takes place.”

Here, the team applied a rheological model advanced previously developed by the Rogers Research Group, known as the Kamani-Donley-Rogers model, which factors in the concept of “Britility” to describe where a material is on the spectrum between the ductile break and the fragile rupture. By quantifying this property in parallel with a behavior at the elastic limit, the model builds a complete image of the rheology of granular hydrogels and allows researchers to adapt these properties during the synthesis process to meet the needs of specific fabrics.

“Knowing how well our model works well, we could then calculate how granular hydrogels will behave under any flow condition or deformation type, as being printed in the body or injected into the body,” said Rogers. “Or what would happen once they are, say, a shoulder joint or a knee joint, or wherever they are going to be injected.”

For Harley, whose laboratory specializes in implantable engineering biomaterials as well as biomaterials that can be used as tissue models outside the body such as bone marrow, the implications are large.

“A healthy bone marrow is essential for life for life,” said Harley. “This is where we produce all the blood and immune cells that we need daily. As humans age, we have changes in the dynamics of how bone marrow behaves, and we have changes in the frequency of hematopoietic malignant tumors, such as multiple myeloma. Completely affect how these cells.

Harley and Rogers are suitable that the reception of their separate areas of expertise was the key to the production of the new framework and the implementation of Groundworks for Real World applications.

“We are starting to see a fundamental change in biomedicine where our communities are increasingly using engineering fabric models, which means that we must better understand how to create more and more sophisticated and increasingly realistic fabric models,” said Harley. “The work we do is fundamental to having high quality fabric models that you could use to understand the progression and aging of the disease, and to validate new therapies.”

“This level of understanding will allow us to design new materials that will make people healthier, faster – and will help them stay better in the long term,” said Rogers.

The predoctoral scholarship holders Gunnar B. Thompson and Jiye Lee are co-premier authors of the newspaper. Rogers is a Westwater professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering (CHBE) at the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. Harley is Professor Robert W. Schaefer at Chbe and is affiliated with the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and the Departments of Materials and Engineering and Bio-Engineering at the Graining College of Engineering, and is a program manager at Cancer Center de l’Illinois.