Stretchable and Anisotropic Conductive Composite Hydrogel as Therapeutic Cardiac Patches

Fabricating concurrently stretchable and conductive hydrogel scaffold is highly desired in the development of myocardial tissue engineering, and also very challenging especially with the anisotropic conductive properties. Existing anisotropic-strategies are limited to specific nanomaterials, or time-consuming. Here, we present a simple and new stretch-induced strategy to make conductive nanotubes aligned in the hydrogel. With this strategy, we fabricated a new type of hybrid hydrogel that possesses excellent stretchability while enabling outstanding anisotropic conductivity (6 vs 30 S/cm). Hybrid hydrogels are also successfully applied as a therapeutic cardiac patch which induces an elongated cell morphology of cultured cardiomyocytes and enables a stable directional transmission of electric signals. This patch gave successful mitigation of myocardium infarction in rats. It is believed that this strategy, and this nanocomposite hydrogel have a promising application in tissue engineering.