Healing Hydrogel May Cause Faster Tissue Regeneration

Want to heal faster? There may be a new material that allows for quicker tissue regeneration. Scientists have developed hydrogels that can promote the proper organization of human cells in order to heal damaged tissue.

A cell's environment in the body is composed of collagen and polymers of sugars. It provides mechanical signals to the cells necessary for their survival and proper organization into a tissue. This, in turn, is essential for healing. In theory, it's possible to create a gel that can mimic this scaffold, helping the healing process.

Creating such a gel, though, is far from simple. It has to precisely reproduce the molecular matrix outside the cell in its physical properties. These properties, like the matrices stiffness, vary in the body depending on the tissue. The researchers decided to modify agarose gels; agarose is a polymer of sugar molecules derived from sea algae. The added a carboxylic acid residue to the molecular structure of the polymer to optimally fit the cell's environment. Hydrogels form when polymer chains that can dissolve in water are crosslinked. In an agarose gel, though, the sugar chains organize into a spring-like structure. By adding a carboxylic acid to this backbone, the polymers formed ribbon-like structures. This allowed the stiffness of the gel to be tuned to adapt the scaffold to every part of the human body.

After creating this new gel, though, the researchers had to test it. They manipulated endothelial cells that make up vascular tissue to organize into blood vessels outside the body. By combining the appropriate biological molecules found in a developing embryo, the scientists identified a single condition that encouraged endothelial cells to form large blood vessel-like structures that were several micrometers in height-a finding that could have huge implications for treating damage to hear and muscle tissue.

"It is really remarkable that the organization of the endothelial cells into these free standing vascular lumens occurs within our gels without the need for support cells," said Prasad Shastri, one of the researchers, in a news release.

The findings could be huge for the future of tissue regeneration. It could potentially help patients that have tissue damage. That said, it will be quite some time before this material can be applied on any kind of large scale endeavor. Researchers still need to conduct further tests to examine its safety and hone its use.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.