Modern
development of flexible electronics has made use of bioelectronic
materials as artificial tissue in vivo. As hydrogels
are more similar to nerve tissue, functional hydrogels have become
a promising candidate for bioelectronics. Meanwhile, interfacing functional
hydrogels and living tissues is at the forefront of bioelectronics.
The peripheral nerve injury often leads to paralysis, chronic pain,
neurologic disorders, and even disability, because it has affected
the bioelectrical signal transmission between the brain and the rest
of body. Here, a kind of light-stimuli-responsive and stretchable
conducting polymer hydrogel (CPH) is developed to explore artificial
nerve. The conductivity of CPH can be enhanced when illuminated by
near-infrared light, which can promote the conduction of the bioelectrical
signal. When CPH is mechanically elongated, it still has high durability
of conductivity and, thus, can accommodate unexpected strain of nerve
tissues in motion. Thereby, CPH can better serve as an implant of
the serious peripheral nerve injury in vivo, especially
in the case that the length of the missing nerve exceeds 10 mm.
Although stem cell‐based therapy is recognized as a promising therapeutic strategy for spinal cord injury (SCI), its efficacy is greatly limited by local reactive oxygen species (ROS)‐abundant and hyper‐inflammatory microenvironments. It is still a challenge to develop bioactive scaffolds with outstanding antioxidant capacity for neural stem cells (NSCs) transplantation. In this study, albumin biomimetic cerium oxide nanoparticles (CeO2@BSA nanoparticles, CeNPs) are prepared in a simple and efficient manner and dispersed in gelatin methacryloyl to obtain the ROS‐scavenging hydrogel (CeNP‐Gel). CeNP‐Gel synergistically promotes neurogenesis via alleviating oxidative stress microenvironments and improving the viability of encapsulated NSCs. More interestingly, in the presence of CeNP‐Gel, microglial polarization to anti‐inflammatory M2 subtype are obviously facilitated, which is further verified to be associated with phosphoinositide 3‐kinase/protein kinase B pathway activation. Additionally, the injectable ROS‐scavenging hydrogel is confirmed to induce the integration and neural differentiation of transplanted NSCs. Compared with the blank‐gel group, the survival rate of NSCs in CeNP‐Gel group is about 3.5 times higher, and the neural differentiation efficiency is about 2.1 times higher. Therefore, the NSCs‐laden ROS‐scavenging hydrogel represents a comprehensive strategy with great application prospect for the treatment of SCI through comprehensively modulating the adverse microenvironment.
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