An international joint research team at CNU has succeeded in developing a cutting-edge material that can quickly regenerate damaged human skin and tendons.

Professor Kim Jang-ho of CNU's Department of Convergent Bio-Systems Engineering, along with Professor Gong Hyun-joon of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Professor Jung Hoon of Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), and NanoBioSys Corporation, jointly developed a new advanced regenerative graphene tough-hydrogel material with excellent biocompatibility and mechanical strength.

The research team actually applied this material to an animal model with damaged skin and tendons and proved its tissue regeneration ability to be more than 30% superior to that of existing materials.
 
Conventional hydrogel materials have attracted attention as materials for tissue regeneration because they are structurally similar to the extracellular matrix of body tissues, but their weak mechanical strength has limited their actual clinical application.
 
The research team applied this material to animal models with damaged skin and blood vessels, demonstrating tissue regeneration abilities exceeding those of existing materials by over 30%.

Conventional hydrogel materials have been attracting attention as tissue regeneration materials because they are structurally similar to extracellular matrixes of tissues in the body. However, their mechanical strength has been insufficient for practical clinical applications.

This research paper, in which Dr. Park Sang-bae and PhD candidate Kim Woo-chan of CNU participated as lead authors, was published in the latest issue of Nano Letters (citation index: 10.8), a renowned American Chemical Society journal in the field of nanotechnology.