This Synthetic Material Helps Wounds Heal

Regenerative medicine made substantial progress thanks to a team of researchers affiliated with McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who developed a robust biomaterial designed to facilitate organ and muscle repair.

“The results are promising, and we hope that one day the new hydrogel will be used as an implant to restore the voice of people with damaged vocal cords, for example, laryngeal cancer survivors,” says Guangyu Bao, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at McGill University.

The hydrogel is an injectable biomaterial that provides room for cells to grow around injured organs. The extreme biomechanics of human vocal cords have been simulated in a machine created to test the hydrogel’s durability. And the biomaterial remained intact after more than 6 million cycles vibrating 120 times a second. The newly created technology could also be used for drug delivery, tissue engineering, the creation of model tissues for drug screening, even to create lungs to test COVID-19 drugs.