Recent Advances in Gels for Tissue Engineering
A special issue of Journal of Functional Biomaterials (ISSN 2079-4983). This special issue belongs to the section "Biomaterials for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 March 2026 | Viewed by 42
Special Issue Editors
Interests: hydrogels; mechanobiology; 3D bioprinting; surface engineering; stem cells
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
In recent years, hydrogel has been recognized as an important tool in tissue engineering. Beyond the traditional bulk hydrogel, recent advancements in hydrogels are geared towards the development of “designer hydrogels” that allow precision control of their properties via incorporation of stimuli-responsive materials, cell-instructive ligands, and bioactive materials. Combining tissue engineering with synthetic biology with synthetic ligands (e.g., fluorescent proteins) also can be used to control a specific cellular function with high precision. To achieve better modeling of native tissue/organs, there is also a growing interest in moving beyond isotropic bulk hydrogels to hydrogels having anisotropic mechanical properties. Additionally, to address one of the major goals in tissue engineering for obtaining transplantable organs, progress is steadily made in the field of biofabrication utilizing hydrogels as (bio)ink to fabricate complex 3D cell-laden constructs, either in bioink design or printing methods. Furthermore, engineering the surface of mammalian cells can give rise to a new class of biomaterials termed “living materials” in which surface-engineered cells act as the building block to fabricate macrotissues. Finally, tissue engineering convergence with artificial intelligence (AI) can give rise to a new class of materials and a system/method to predict and optimize the physicochemical properties of the hydrogels.
This Special Issue focuses on the recent advances of hydrogels and their application in tissue engineering. Submissions are welcome on the following topics:
- Hydrogels functionalized with novel stimuli-responsive, bioactive, and cell-instructive materials, for promoting angiogenesis and (stem) cells differentiation.
- Integration of hydrogels with orthogonal ligands.
- Hydrogels with mechanical anisotropy for mimicking tissues (e.g., osteochondral tissue).
- Biofabrication using hydrogel-based bioinks.
- Surface engineering of uni- or multi-cellular organisms with hydrogels.
- AI-driven design and optimization of hydrogels.
Dr. Wildan Mubarok
Prof. Dr. Yujiang Fan
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- biomaterials
- cell-instructive biomaterials
- biofabrication
- 3D bioprinting
- mechanotransduction
- stem cells differentiation
- surface engineering
- living materials
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