Preliminary study on acrylated Pluronic F127-based hydrogels as artificial blood vessel materials

Hydrogels with improved mechanical properties have been widely regarded as ideal candidates for constructing artificial blood vessels. Herein, a series of dual network and non-swollen hydrogel scaffolds were prepared and their potential application as artificial blood vessels was preliminarily studied. The hydrogels were mainly constructed by co-crosslinking of acrylated Pluronic F127 (F127DA) and methacrylated hyaluronic acid (HAMA), in which F127DA was used as the first soft network via thermal-response self-assembly and HAMA was designed as the second rigid network. By further introducing methacrylated gelatin (GelMA) and heparin (HepMA), the optimized Hydrogel (2) showed excellent mechanical properties and biocompatibility. It exhibited high compression stress (9.36 MPa) and fracture energy (56.54 MJ m−3), and the prepared hydrogel tubes exhibited comparable burst pressure and compliance value to that of natural blood vessels. Additionally, due to the introduction of bioactive molecules, including gelatin, heparin and growth factor VEGF, the hydrogel tubes showed good cytocompatibility, semi-permeability and hemocompatibility. We expect that the designed hydrogel tubes has the potential as artificial vascular grafts, although there are still many challenges before their real application, including the solution of suture problems, more evaluations about the biological and blood compatibility, etc.