Hydrogel Represents Leap Forward for Tissue Engineering

Scientists at the Univ. of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney) have created a novel hydrogel that may change the way human tissue is grown in the lab. It could help advance tissue engineering applications across disease modeling, drug discovery and screening, and regenerative medicine.

Lab-grown tissues provide a more accessible way to study and engineer biological processes. For instance, scientists can use patient cells to cultivate organoids — miniature 3D cell cultures resembling real tissues in structure and function. This technology not only enables patient-specific studies but also holds the potential for tissue regeneration; it may one day lead to a solution to replace tissues or organs that fail due to disease or injury.

However, organoids have faced limitations in their utility for drug development and regenerative medicine. This is largely because they are commonly grown using an animal-derived hydrogel known as Matrigel. Matrigel serves as an indispensable scaffold to help cells organize and develop into 3D cultures. But Matrigel is also derived from cancerous mouse material, making its translation into viable human therapies unlikely due to potential negative immune response.

With these limitations in mind, the UNSW team sought to create a new bioactive hydrogel more targeted to human studies.

“We were interested in developing a synthetic material that can recreate a lot of the really useful properties of mouse-derived hydrogels,” says Ashley Nguyen, a PhD student in the UNSW School of Chemistry and the study’s first author.

Nguyen and team based their hydrogel on an unexplored assembly motif known as the tryptophan zipper (Trpzip). Trpzip peptides have multiple tryptophan amino acids that naturally...