I am proud to announce that my paper “Injectable Hybrid Hydrogels, with Cell-Responsive Degradation, for Tumor Resection” has just been published by the journal ACS Applied Biomaterial, a journal of the American Chemical Society family.
In this paper – the result of three years of hard work and of the collaboration between the group of Prof. Luisa De Cola (Institut de Science et d’Ingeniérie Supramoléculaires, CNRS) and Prof. Silvana Perretta (IRCAD France) – we report an injectable hydrogel-based material that can be employed to assist the endoscopic resection of early-stage gastric cancer.
The material is a nanocomposite poly(amidoamine)s-based hydrogel, and contains silica nanoshells in the covalent backbone so that they can release bioactive molecules on demand. This hydrogel is cost-effective and easily injectable in the submucosa layer of the stomach, where it immediately forms a stable submucosal fluid cushion. This can reduce the risk of perforation and bleeding during the minimally-invasive surgery, but its degraded in a few days after the surgery forming non-toxic degradation products that can be easily expelled from the body.
