| Self-healing hydrogels could recover their structure and functionality after broken by external force. No doubt, self-healing materials could make materials that are hard to accessible more durable. Self-healing hydrogels have drawn great attentions among researchers, based on the bio-mimic characteristic of the self-healing materials and the hydrogels'structural similarity to the body. However, the severe crosslinking or self-healing condition restrict their further application in biomedical areas. Therefore, we focused on developing a hydrogel that could form and self-heal in mild conditions. Further, we studied the possibility of this hydrogel for tissue engineering and drug delivery usage.Here we developed a self-healing chitosan-based hydrogel using the biocompatible glycolchitosan (GCS) and dibenzaldehyde-terminated poly(ethylene-glycol) (DF-PEG) as the gelators. By simply mixing the two solutions of GCS and DF-PEG, the CP hydrogel could be prepared within 1 min. It is constructed by dynamic Schiff-base that keeps breaking and regenerating in the hydrogel network, thus leading to the self-healing and injectable properties. Different from other injectable hydrogels using liquid precursors prior to the injection, this interesting hydrogel could be crushed and pushed through a needle as solid hydrogel pieces, which recovered then as a whole under physiological condition, avoiding the uncontrollable gelation process and the drastic change of physical conditions.Firstly, we put the chitosan-based self-healing hydrogel into tissue engineering usage and established a three-dimensional cell scaffold. Then discussed the relation between the proliferation rate of the encapsulated cells and the matrix stiffness. And studied the change in proliferation before and after injection experiment. Secondly, we applied the CP hydrogel as a drug carrier in a hemostatic and wound healing experiment. The excellent wound healing property demonstrated the importance of drug carrier. |
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