Highly Flexible and Resilient Elastin Hybrid Cryogels with Shape Memory, Injectability, Conductivity, and Magnetic Responsive Properties

Yuqing Liu; Kaige Xu; Qiang Chang; Mohammad Ali Darabi; Bojie Lin; Wen Zhong; Malcolm Xing

doi:10.1002/adma.201601066

Highly Flexible and Resilient Elastin Hybrid Cryogels with Shape Memory, Injectability, Conductivity, and Magnetic Responsive Properties

Adv Mater. 2016 Sep;28(35):7758-67. doi: 10.1002/adma.201601066. Epub 2016 Jul 15.

Authors

Yuqing Liu^{1

2}, Kaige Xu^{1

2}, Qiang Chang^{1

2}, Mohammad Ali Darabi^{1

2}, Bojie Lin^{1

2}, Wen Zhong³, Malcolm Xing^{4

5}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, R3T 2N2, Canada.
² The Children's Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, R3E 3P4, Canada.
³ Department of Biosystems Engineering, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, R3T 2N2, Canada.
⁴ Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, R3T 2N2, Canada. [email protected].
⁵ The Children's Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, R3E 3P4, Canada. [email protected].

PMID: 27417289
DOI: 10.1002/adma.201601066

Abstract

A strategy utilizing elastin peptide macroporous cryogels to build highly flexible scaffolds to load carbon nanotubes, polypyrrole, and iron oxide magnetic nanoparticles, is presented. This combines high elasticity, flexibility, shape memory property, and injectable property together with conductivity and/or magnetic responsive property. The network can afford 97.5% compressive strain with an excellent conductivity of 50.1 ± 2.9 S cm(-1) at 90% strain.

Keywords: conductivity; cryogels; elastin peptides; high resilience; injectables; magnetic responsiveness.