Dynamic injectable tissue adhesives with strong adhesion and rapid self-healing for regeneration of large muscle injury.

Wounds often necessitate the use of instructive biomaterials to facilitate effective healing. Yet, consistently filling the wound and retaining the material in place presents notable challenges. Here, we develop a new class of injectable tissue adhesives by leveraging the dynamic crosslinking chemistry of Schiff base reactions. These adhesives demonstrate outstanding mechanical properties, especially in regard to stretchability and self-healing capacity, and biodegradability. Furthermore, they also form robust adhesion to biological tissues. Their therapeutic potential was evaluated in a rodent model of volumetric muscle loss (VML). Ultrasound imaging confirmed that the adhesives remained within the wound site, effectively filled the void, and degraded at a rate comparable to the healing process. Histological analysis indicated that the adhesives facilitated muscle fiber and blood vessel formation, and induced anti-inflammatory macrophages. Notably, the injured muscles of mice treated with the adhesives displayed increased weight and higher force generation than the control groups. This approach to adhesive design paves the way for the next generation of medical adhesives in tissue repair.

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Copyright © 2024. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests:David Mooney reports financial support was provided by National Institutes of Health. David Mooney, Sungmin Nam, Junzhe Lou have patent pending to the adhesive materials. David J. Mooney, Sungmin Nam, and Junzhe Lou are inventors on patent applications on the adhesive materials utilized in this study. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.