2023-06-09 10:30:00
‘Actually, my colleague was disappointed when he suddenly had a gel on his lab table. Because you can’t work with a gel. We think differently now.
‘We researched materials that we wanted to use in the security features of passports and bills. A colleague was working on an advanced plastic consisting of helixes. A helix turns the light in a certain direction, which can come in handy in a security feature.
‘We had to be able to dissolve that plastic in water, because paper is made with water. That was a challenge, none of our strategies worked. My colleague wanted to finish and continue the next day, so he put his bottle in the fridge. The pieces of plastic floated through the water.
‘The next day he came back to the laboratory and the liquid was transparent: the plastic had dissolved. My colleague briefly put the solution on his lab table and was called away for something else. When he came back, the solution had turned into a gel. And it didn’t stop there: after a night in the fridge it became a solution again.
‘As chemists, we immediately thought: this is not right. Normally you put a solution in the refrigerator to make a gel, just like when you set a gelatin dessert. But our gel formed at a high temperature and became a solution at a low temperature.
Like a biological material
‘We decided to look more closely at the material and that’s when it got interesting. Our synthetic gel behaved like a biological gel. When we pulled or pushed it, it became more and more firm. Most synthetic gels would break.
‘This was really special. We were the first to create a synthetic material that behaved like a biological material. We now understand how that works. The loose helixes stick together to form bundles and the bundles stick together again. You also see the same hierarchical structure in the connective tissue of a human being.
‘We want to use our discovery to grow cells. Now hospitals and laboratories all use the same gel. It works great, but it has major drawbacks. For example, it is extracted from mice, which costs millions of animals every year. The gel also contains ten thousand mouse proteins, the function of which we usually do not know. These proteins can even cause the results of cell studies to be incorrect.
‘So there are a lot of people waiting for a good alternative. We can offer that. Our synthetic gel does not cost mouse lives and contains no superfluous proteins. In addition: if you put our gel in the fridge, it becomes liquid. For example, researchers can first grow cells, then separate the cells from the gel and finally examine the individual cells.
‘We are now working on commercially deploying our product. We are about to start a business. Hopefully, in about five years’ time we will be rid of the old gel and all researchers will be using ours.’
Paul Kouwer is an associate professor at Radboud University. He is developing a synthetic hydrogel that biomedical researchers can use to culture cells.
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