Liquid metal biomaterials: a newly emerging area to tackle modern biomedical challenges

Conventional biomaterials, such as metals, polymers, composites and ceramics, may not work well when facing certain tough medical challenges. As an alternative, body-temperature liquid metals, such as gallium, or its alloys are recently emerging as new generation functional materials which display many unconventional properties superior to traditional biomaterials, i.e. high fluidity, excellent electrical and thermal conductivities, good biocompatibility, sufficient radiopacity, controllable behaviour, easy manufacture and low cost. This article aims to outline a new biomedical category: liquid metal biomaterials. Representative applications enabled by liquid metal biomaterials from both therapeutic and diagnostic aspects were reviewed. Furthermore, related efforts and perspective for future development of employing liquid metals to resolve modern biomedical tough issues were discussed. With continuous technical progresses and fundamental discoveries, liquid metals are expected to offer more and more outstanding merits as a new class of biomaterials which are promising a generalised way towards resolving biomedical challenges.