{"id":213473,"date":"2025-05-07T10:13:59","date_gmt":"2025-05-07T15:13:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/new-hydrogel-semiconductor-could-lead-to-better-tissue-interfaced-bioelectronics"},"modified":"2025-05-07T10:13:59","modified_gmt":"2025-05-07T15:13:59","slug":"new-hydrogel-semiconductor-could-lead-to-better-tissue-interfaced-bioelectronics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/new-hydrogel-semiconductor-could-lead-to-better-tissue-interfaced-bioelectronics","title":{"rendered":"New hydrogel semiconductor could lead to better tissue-interfaced bioelectronics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/new-hydrogel-semiconductor-could-lead-to-better-tissue-interfaced-bioelectronics.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The ideal material for interfacing electronics with living tissue is soft, stretchable, and just as water-loving as the tissue itself\u2014in short, a hydrogel. Semiconductors, the key materials for bioelectronics such as pacemakers, biosensors, and drug delivery devices, on the other hand, are rigid, brittle, and water-hating, impossible to dissolve in the way hydrogels have traditionally been built.<\/p>\n<p>A paper <a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/10.1126\/science.adp9314\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> today in <i>Science<\/i> from the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) has solved this challenge that has long stymied researchers, reimagining the process of creating hydrogels to build a powerful semiconductor in <a href=\"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/tags\/hydrogel\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">hydrogel<\/a> form. Led by Asst. Prof. Sihong Wang\u2019s research group, the result is a bluish gel that flutters like a sea jelly in water but retains the immense semiconductive ability needed to transmit information between living tissue and machine.<\/p>\n<p>The material demonstrated tissue-level moduli as soft as 81 kPa, stretchability of 150% strain, and charge-carrier mobility up to 1.4 cm<sup>2<\/sup> V<sup>-1<\/sup> s<sup>-1<\/sup>. This means their material\u2014both semiconductor and hydrogel at the same time\u2014ticks all the boxes for an ideal bioelectronic interface.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The ideal material for interfacing electronics with living tissue is soft, stretchable, and just as water-loving as the tissue itself\u2014in short, a hydrogel. Semiconductors, the key materials for bioelectronics such as pacemakers, biosensors, and drug delivery devices, on the other hand, are rigid, brittle, and water-hating, impossible to dissolve in the way hydrogels have traditionally [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-213473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-engineering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}