Nano‐Biomedicine based on Liquid Metal Particles and Allied Materials

Abstract

Liquid metals (LMs) have emerged as a new class of functional materials with attractive characteristics of low melting points and metal properties. Remarkable features, such as biocompatibility, injectability, plasticity, conductivity, and shape transformability, have rendered them as excellent candidates to tackle challenging biomedical issues, such as tumor clinics, tissue engineering, and even nerve connection. Scaling down the droplet size offers more opportunities in surface engineering and functionalization, thus providing broad biomedical scenarios expanding from drug delivery, enhanced bioheat transfer, tumor therapeutics, and bioelectronics to nanorobots. Despite in its infancy stage, a summary about the advancement of LM biomedical nanomaterials is urgently needed. This review aims to highlight the advantages of gallium‐based LM nanoparticles enabled nano‐biomedicine, to summarize the recent synthesis methods with diverse LM compositions, structures and surface modifications, and to introduce their typical state‐of‐the‐art biomedical applications. Challenges and opportunities are also discussed in the end.

Liquid Metal Transformable Machines

“…In fact, transformable machines based on the liquid metal and the allied compositions or hybrids have cultivated numerous original breakthroughs, fantastic strategies, and practical applications to the field of soft robotics. − The large-scaled transformable behavior of the liquid metal was discovered for the first time by our team, which opens a new era of robotics to revolutionize the traditional manufacture of soft robots . Surprisingly, through an unexpected discovery, after engulfing a small amount of aluminum, liquid metal mollusks can be self-fueled and move across the narrow gaps, which paves the way to making self-fueled soft robots.…”

Exploring Interfacial Graphene Oxide Reduction by Liquid Metals: Application in Selective Biosensing

“…S ince the emergence of room-and near-room-temperature liquid metals (LMs), such materials have experienced increasing attention due to their fascinating features such as soft fluidic nature and high electronic and thermal conductivities. 1,2 During the past decade, LMs have found wide applications in various research disciplines ranging from therapeutics 3,4 and microfluidics 5 to material synthesis 6 and catalysis. 7,8 As representatives of the LM family, gallium (Ga) and its eutectic alloys have received interest in various studies owing to their low toxicity and negligible vapor pressure.…”

“…Since the emergence of room- and near-room-temperature liquid metals (LMs), such materials have experienced increasing attention due to their fascinating features such as soft fluidic nature and high electronic and thermal conductivities. , During the past decade, LMs have found wide applications in various research disciplines ranging from therapeutics , and microfluidics to material synthesis and catalysis. , As representatives of the LM family, gallium (Ga) and its eutectic alloys have received interest in various studies owing to their low toxicity and negligible vapor pressure. , Specifically, tunable surface properties in addition to the soft and dynamic interface of Ga-based LMs make them promising reaction media for the synthesis of diverse materials . Another unique property of Ga-based LMs is related to the presence of different oxidation states of Ga, which enables the tailoring of redox-mediated synthesis routes in electrolytic or galvanic configurations .…”

Responsive Liquid Metal Droplets: From Bulk to Nano

“…Significantly different from traditional liquid, as illustrated in Table 1, room temperature Ga-based liquid metal (LM) combining the characteristics of fluid and metal has recently attracted increased attention [34][35][36][37][38]. They possess excellent fluidity [39,40], extraordinary electrical conductivity [41][42][43], high thermal conductivity [44][45][46], and low toxicity [47][48][49], and therefore show great potential in soft and flexible electronics [50][51][52], biomedicine [53][54][55], thermal interface materials [56][57][58], chemical catalysis [59][60][61][62], and soft robots [63][64][65]. As a metal fluid, LM is immiscible with water, oil, and ionic liquids, which means that bulk LM could be divided into small droplets in other immiscible solutions [2].…”