Integrally formed asymmetric hydrogel for biomaterials and bioelectronic interfaces
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ABSTRACT
Hydrogels are widely used in biomedicine due to their excellent flexibility, adhesion, and biocompatibility. However, there are some bottlenecks in their structural design and functional application. The Janus structure, inspired by the ancient Roman double-sided protector, provides a different idea for material design in complex biomedical scenarios due to its unique "asymmetric" characteristics, which has been widely used in the field of biomaterials. The asymmetric Janus hydrogel breaks the limitation of the traditional hydrogel "isotropic". The two sides of asymmetric hydrogels have different physical, chemical, or biological properties, showing the characteristics of asymmetric properties. Among them, the two asymmetric properties represented by "adhesion-antiadhesion" and "hydrophobicity/hydrophilicity" have been widely studied. In this paper, the structural characteristics and preparation techniques of different types of asymmetric hydrogels are discussed, and the possible future development of Janus hydrogels is also proposed. -
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REFERENCES
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Lin H., Pang S., Wu J., et al. (2026). Integrally formed asymmetric hydrogel for biomaterials and bioelectronic interfaces. The Innovation Materials 4:100222. https://doi.org/10.59717/j.xinn-mater.2026.100222
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Lin H., Pang S., Wu J., et al. (2026). Integrally formed asymmetric hydrogel for biomaterials and bioelectronic interfaces. The Innovation Materials 4:100222. https://doi.org/10.59717/j.xinn-mater.2026.100222
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Figure 1.
The schematic illustration of heterogeneous properties of the Janus hydrogel and application of Janus hydrogel
