Liquid metal biomaterials: translational medicines, challenges and perspectives

Until now, significant healthcare challenges and growing urgent clinical requirements remain incompletely addressed by presently available biomedical materials. This is due to their inadequate mechanical compatibility, suboptimal physical and chemical properties, susceptibility to immune rejection, and concerns about long-term biological safety. As an alternative, liquid metal (LM) opens up a promising class of biomaterials with unique advantages like biocompatibility, flexibility, excellent electrical conductivity, and ease of functionalization. However, despite the unique advantages and successful explorations of LM in biomedical fields, widespread clinical translations and applications of LM-based medical products remain limited. This article summarizes the current status and future prospects of LM biomaterials, interprets their applications in healthcare, medical imaging, bone repair, nerve interface, and tumor therapy, etc. Opportunities to translate LM materials into medicine and obstacles encountered in practices are discussed. Following that, we outline a blueprint for LM clinics, emphasizing their potential in making new-generation artificial organs. Last, the core challenges of LM biomaterials in clinical translation, including bio-safety, material stability, and ethical concerns are also discussed. Overall, the current progress, translational medicine bottlenecks, and perspectives of LM biomaterials signify their immense potential to drive future medical breakthroughs and thus open up novel avenues for upcoming clinical practices. This review highlights the diverse bioapplications of liquid metals in monitoring and imaging, tissue repairing, and tumor therapy, analyzes the translational obstacles, and envisions the future development towards artificial organs.