Conductive materials that match the elastic moduli of biological tissue (0.5-500 kPa) are desired to enable long-term interfaces between electronics and biological systems, which are critical for a wide range of applications, including neural recording, prosthetics, and tissue engineering. Our group recently demonstrated that materials with high electronic conductivity and tissue-level softness can be fabricated using hydrogels formed from the conducting polymer PEDOT:PSS. Despite these excellent material properties, the ability to pattern PEDOT:PSS hydrogels is still required to enable their integration with multi-functional and multi-channel bioelectronics, as well as to endow conductive cell scaffolds with hierarchical levels of spatial organization that better mimic real tissue systems. In this work, we present a novel electrochemical gelation (“electro-gelation”) method for rapidly patterning PEDOT:PSS hydrogels on any two-dimensional conductive template, including curved and stretchable surfaces. We demonstrate that electro-gelation enables precise control over gel morphology and mechanical properties, thereby enabling high-performance conducting gels with tissue-mimetic mechanical properties to be introduced into increasingly complex bioelectronics and tissue scaffold architectures.

Electrochemical patterning of tissue-mimetic conductive hydrogels

2019 Fall National Meeting

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