New gel coatings may lead to better catheters and condoms
Catheters, intravenous lines, and other types of surgical tubing are a medical necessity for managing a wide range of diseases. But a patient’s experience with such devices is rarely a comfortable one. Now MIT engineers have designed a gel-like material that can be coated onto standard plastic or rubber devices, providing a softer, more slippery exterior that can significantly ease a patient’s discomfort. The coating can even be tailored to monitor and treat signs of infection. In a paper published today in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials, the team describes their method for strongly bonding a layer of hydrogel — a squishy, slippery polymer material that consists mostly of water — to common elastomers such as latex, rubber, and silicone. The results are “hydrogel laminates” that are at once soft, stretchable, and slippery, and impermeable to viruses and other small molecules. The hydrogel coating can be embedded with compounds to sense, for example,...