Living Materials Could Revolutionize Medical Gas Therapy Delivery
- Authors
- Pei Pan, Tao Liu, Lu Zhang, Xian-Zheng Zhang
- Journal
- Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews
- Year
- 2025
- DOI
- 10.1016/j.addr.2025.115738
- Study Type
- clinical
- Peer Reviewed
- Yes
- Country
- China
- Health Condition
- Cancer
- Body System
- Immune System
TL;DR
Scientists created tiny "living medicines" made from bacteria and cells that can produce healing gases like nitric oxide right where they're needed in your body, which works way better than old-fashioned delivery methods because these living materials are safer and smarter about finding diseased areas. This could eventually help treat cancer, infections, and help wounds heal faster.
Key Finding
Living materials engineered from biological entities show promise as delivery systems for therapeutic gases, offering better biocompatibility and disease-targeting capabilities than conventional nanocarriers, though significant safety and manufacturing challenges remain.
Summary
This review examines how scientists are developing 'living materials'—engineered systems made from bacteria, cells, or algae—to deliver therapeutic gases like hydrogen to treat disease. Unlike traditional drug delivery systems, these living materials can actively produce gases on their own, target diseased areas, and respond to changes in the body's environment. The review summarizes recent progress in using these systems for cancer, inflammatory diseases, and tissue repair.
Practical Takeaway
This is a review article summarizing early-stage research—not a clinical study testing hydrogen therapy in humans. While the concept of using engineered biological systems to deliver hydrogen gas is scientifically interesting, there is no evidence yet that these approaches are safe or effective in people. Much more research, including human trials, would be needed before any therapeutic application.
Abstract
The clinical translation of gas therapy, which employs medical gases such as nitric oxide (NO), carbon monoxide (CO), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), hydrogen (H2), and sulfur dioxide (SO2), is mainly limited by the absence of delivery systems that can provide precise spatiotemporal control in complex pathological environments. While conventional nanocarriers have improved in gas delivery, they often suffer from limited biocompatibility, poor targeting, and insufficient responsiveness. Recently, living materials emerged as a promising and innovative paradigm. Engineered from biological entities such as bacteria, cells, and algae, or their biomimetic derivatives, these materials inherently exhibit bioactive functions, including disease tropism, immunomodulation, and dynamic responsiveness to microenvironmental cues, thereby enabling intelligent gas generation and controlled release. This review systematically summarizes recent advances in living material-based gas therapy, with emphasis on classification according to biological origin and engineering design principles. We further discuss their mechanisms, including genetic programming for autonomous gas production and hybrid architectures for stimuli-responsive release, and highlight their therapeutic efficacy in cancer, inflammatory diseases, and tissue regeneration. Finally, we outline the major challenges in biosafety and scalability, and provide forward-looking perspectives on the integration of synthetic biology and multimodal therapeutic strategies to advance the field of precision gas medicine.