Mechanical Characterization of Human Brain Tissue and Soft Dynamic Gels Exhibiting Electromechanical Neuro-Mimicry

Abstract

Synthetic hydrogels are an important class of materialsin tissue engineering, drug delivery, and other biomedicalfields. Their mechanical and electrical properties can betuned to match those of biological tissues. In this work,we report on hydrogels that exhibit both mechanical andelectrical biomimicry. The presented dual networks consistof supramolecular networks formed from 2:1 homoternarycomplexes of imidazolium-based guest molecules in cucu-bit[8]uril and covalent networks of oligoethylene glycol-(di)methacrylate. We also investigate the viscoelastic prop-erties of human brain tissues. The mechanical properties ofthe dual network gels are benchmarked against the humantissue, and we find that they both are neuro-mimetic and ex-hibit cytocompatiblity in a neural stem cell model.