Living Hydrogels: Harnessing Microorganism-Material Synergy for Next-Generation Therapeutics

Evidence from laboratory and animal studies provides groundwork for understanding mechanisms and potential before human studies continue.

• Level A · Stronger Clinical Evidence
• Level B · Emerging clinical evidence with positive signals
• Level C · Early human research exploring benefits
• Level D · Scientific groundwork from lab and animal studies
• Emerging · Emerging topic under active research

Abstract (original English)

Microorganism-based therapies, particularly those utilizing probiotics, have emerged as a powerful biomedical strategy owing to their inherent living functionalities. These living systems can dynamically interact with host environments and self-regulate their activity, offering superior adaptability, prolonged functionality, and microenvironmental responsiveness compared to conventional non-living therapeutic platforms. Despite these advantages, the direct administration of probiotics faces several challenges, such as poor viability, limited retention at target sites, and the inability to control therapeutic effects in a spatiotemporally precise manner. To address these challenges, embedding probiotics within hydrogel matrices has proven effective in enhancing microbial stability, prolonging in vivo retention, and enabling precise and sustained therapeutic delivery through synergistic interactions between the hydrogels and living microorganisms. This review provides a comprehensive overview of the materials and design strategies employed in the construction of living microorganism-encapsulated hydrogels (living hydrogels), with particular emphasis on the dynamic interactions and synergistic mechanisms of hydrogel-microorganism systems. We further illustrate how these mechanisms can achieve various biomedical applications, such as modulating gut microbiota to treat gastrointesti

Evidence level

Evidence from laboratory and animal studies provides groundwork for understanding mechanisms and potential before human studies continue.

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