Soft but tough: Biohybrid materials work like cartilage
Producing biomaterials that match the performance of cartilage and tendons has been a elusive goal for scientists, but new materials created at Cornell represent a promising new approach to mimic natural tissue. The results are published July 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and provide a new strategy for synthesizing clinical solutions for damaged tissue. The tissue must be soft enough to bend and flex, but durable enough to withstand prolonged loads – for example, the loads that the knee tendons have to support. When tissues are worn or damaged, collagen hydrogels and synthetic materials have the potential to serve as substitutes, but they do not have the right combination of biological and mechanical properties of natural tissues. Now, Cornell researchers have engineered a biohybrid composite material with essential characteristics of natural tissue. It consists of two main ingredients: collagen – which provides softness and biocompatibility to the materia