An injectable self-healing hydrogel-cellulose nanocrystals conjugate with excellent mechanical strength and good biocompatibility

In this work, a novel strategy for the construction of injectable self-healing nanocomposite (NC) hydrogels dominated by reversible boronic ester bonds was demonstrated. Specifically, NC hydrogels were constructed by the solution-mixing of N, N-dimethylacrylamide-stat-3-acrylamidophenylboronicacid statistical copolymers (PDMA-stat-PAPBA) and poly(glycerolmonomethacrylate) (PGMA) chains grafted cellulose nanocrystals (CNC-g-PGMA). Rheology analysis indicated the as-constructed NC hydrogel displayed about 7-fold increase in the storage modulus with a low CNCs loading level of 1.43 wt% in comparison with PGMA/PDMA-stat-PAPBA hydrogel without CNCs. Furthermore, the mechanical strength of the CNC-g-PGMA/PDMA-stat-PAPBA hydrogel was far superior to that of its PGMA/PDMA-stat-PAPBA/CNCs hydrogel counterpart, in which PGMA chains were not covalently grafted on the surfaces of CNCs. Due to reversible boronic ester bonds cross-linking networks, CNC-g-PGMA/PDMA-stat-PAPBA NC hydrogel exhibited excellent self-healing and injectable properties as well as pH/glucose responsive sol-gel transitions. Good biocompatibility was also demonstrated through in vitro cytotoxicity tests.