Squishy, soft, and full of H2O, hydrogels don’t sound or look like groundbreaking science, but the biomedical community has recently been capitalizing on their potential to transform modern medicine. Hydrogels are made from networks of long chains of molecules called polymers. These polymers form a net, and thus they can hold onto large amounts of water and other molecules. Scientists have recently been exploring ways to fine-tune these hydrogels by adjusting how tightly these polymer chains are connected, making them softer, stiffer, or even responsive to environmental factors such as pH or temperature. Some hydrogels swell, shrink, or form crosslinks (connections between polymers) in response to these environmental factors, while others may respond to things like light or certain enzymes. 

You have probably encountered hydrogels before without even realizing it. Contact lenses use hydrogel polymers to stay soft and breathable for wearers. Similarly, diapers and other sanitary products rely on super-absorbent hydrogels to lock in moisture. Many wound dressings are also hydrogel-based, enabling injuries to heal more efficiently by keeping them moist and clean.

In a more medical sense, one of hydrogel’s most exciting applications is in drug delivery. Traditional medications often spread throughout the body and dilute quickly, causing unwanted side effects. Comparatively, hydrogels offer more targeted drug delivery. Drugs or other therapeutic molecules can be loaded into hydrogels and released slowly over time or only under certain conditions in the body. This approach has the potential to dramatically improve treatments like chemotherapy, which can be incredibly draining, both physically and mentally for patients. Instead of flooding the entire body with chemo, doctors could place a hydrogel infused with the treatment directly into a tumor (or the tumor resection margin, which is the space where the tumor used to be after it is removed, or resected, from the body through surgery), allowing the medicine to act locally while sparing healthy tissue.

Hydrogels are also playing a major role in the progression of tissue engineering. Inside the body, cells rely on a supportive structure called the extracellular matrix, which helps them to grow and function effectively. Hydrogels can be designed to mimic this extracellular matrix, thus providing cells with an artificial scaffold to attach to and organize themselves, which can accelerate natural processes like tissue regeneration or cell repair.

Iris Pascual, Madison Burgess, and Julia Coppo, UPSMR juniors, are currently working on a research project evaluating how internal pH and temperature can impact the functionality of hydrogels in the context of cancer therapy:

“Through our lab design and tests, we are trying to measure how the diffusion rates of hydrogels, or how fast drugs move out of them, differ in different environmental conditions– specifically in two different pH levels: physiologically normal v.s acidic, and two different temperatures: physiologically normal v.s hot. That way we could evaluate how hydrogels behave in normal body physiology to that typical of a tumor microenvironment.” – Julia Coppo, junior

“I chose this project because cancer affects so many people and I wanted to explore how treatments could be made more targeted and less harmful to the rest of the body. We’re using hydrogels to model how drugs could be released slowly at a tumor site instead of throughout the body. For me, it’s meaningful to work on something connected to real medicine, and it’s even better getting to explore this with my friends!” – Iris Pascual, junior.

Overall, Hydrogels may seem small and simple, but they are paving the way for revolutionary science, both in the 800’s hallway at Hills, and within research labs across the world!