Dear Colleagues,

The recent advances in fabrication of hydrogels with novel architectures and multi-dimensional attributes such as self-recovery, adhesiveness, conductivity, sensing, biostability, and many more offer great potential in the field of biomedical engineering. Several architectural topologies, such as double-network hydrogels, hybrid-ionic gels, nanocomposite gels, and dynamic crosslinked gels, have been introduced over the last two decades to surpass the poor mechanical properties of conventional hydrogels.

Integrating such multifunctional tough hydrogels with advanced manufacturing techniques has provided opportunities in the fabrication of medical devices that never existed before, including implantable devices, engineered tissue, medical wearables, soft electrodes and bioelectronics, artificial organs, soft actuators, rapid diagnostics, and platforms for drug discovery and disease studies.

The Special Issue of “Advances in Multifunctional Tough Hydrogels for Medical Devices” emphasizes new synthetic hydrogels and their associated advanced fabrication techniques for engineering medical devices. The key topics of this Special Issue will include but are not limited to enhancement of biochemical, mechanical, electrical, architectural, biophysical, and other properties of tough hydrogels required for medical devices; advanced manufacturing and fabrication of multifunctional tough hydrogels; theoretical fundamentals of tough hydrogels for artificial muscles and implantable devices; functional tough hydrogels in wearable medical gadgets; and tough hydrogels for biosensors and bioelectronics. 

We look forward to receiving your contributions to this Special Issue.

Dr. Farshad Oveissi
Dr. Sina Naficy
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Gels is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• tough hydrogels
• medical devices
• conductive tough hydrogels
• biosensor gels
• tough gels for artificial muscles
• self-recovery
• tissue engineering
• biomedical engineering