Medical–grade bio–glue inspired by slugs sticks to biological surfaces without toxicity.
Anyone who has ever tried to put on a Band–Aid when their skin is damp knows that it can be frustrating. Wet skin isn’t the only challenge for medical adhesives – the human body is full of blood, serum, and other fluids that complicate the repair of numerous internal injuries. Many of the adhesive products are toxic to cells, inflexible when they dry, and do not bind strongly to biological tissue.

A team of researchers from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has created a super–strong “tough adhesive” that is biocompatible and binds to tissues with a strength comparable to the body’s own resilient cartilage, even when they’re wet.

“The key feature of our material is the combination of a very strong adhesive force and the ability to transfer and dissipate stress, which have historically not been integrated into a single adhesive,” says corresponding author Dave Mooney, PhD, who is a founding Core Faculty member at the Wyss Institute and the Robert P. Pinkas Family Professor of Bioengineering at SEAS.

The research was reported in the journal Science.

When first author Jianyu Li, PhD (former Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wyss Institute and now an Assistant Professor at McGill University) started thinking about how to improve medical adhesives, he found a solution in an unlikely place: a slug. The Dusky Arion (Arion subfuscus), common in Europe and parts of the United States, secretes a special kind of mucus when threatened that glues it in place, making it difficult for a predator to pry it off its surface. This glue was previously determined to be composed of a tough matrix peppered with positively charged proteins, which inspired Li and his colleagues to create a double–layered hydrogel consisting of an alginate–polyacrylamide matrix supporting an adhesive layer that has positively–charged polymers protruding from its surface.

The polymers bond to biological tissues via three mechanisms – electrostatic attraction to negatively charged cell surfaces, covalent bonds between neighboring atoms, and physical interpenetration – making the adhesive extremely strong. But the matrix layer is equally important, says Li: “Most prior material designs have focused only on the interface between the tissue and the adhesive. Our adhesive is able to dissipate energy through its matrix layer, which enables it to deform much more before it breaks.” The team’s design for the matrix layer includes calcium ions that are bound to the alginate hydrogel via ionic bonds. When stress is applied to the adhesive, those “sacrificial” ionic bonds break first, allowing the matrix to absorb a large amount of energy before its structure becomes compromised. In experimental tests, more than three times the energy was needed to disrupt the tough adhesive’s bonding compared with other medical–grade adhesives and, when it did break, what failed was the hydrogel itself, not the bond between the adhesive and the tissue, demonstrating an unprecedented level of simultaneous high adhesion strength and matrix toughness.