Users
Why Hydrogel Testing is Stuck in the 1990s
Sinan Gölhan
Founder & CEO at GelTech Labs
Hydrogels are among the most advanced materials we deploy in medicine, consumer products, and climate tech.
But the way we test them hasn’t meaningfully changed in decades.
That mismatch is quietly slowing down innovation.
The uncomfortable truth about standards
Most hydrogel characterization today still relies on test methods defined years ago under standards bodies like ASTM and ISO. While the materials have evolved dramatically, the prescribed workflows largely have not.
Swelling, degradation, and release assays are still typically performed by:
Manually weighing samples
Moving gels between beakers
Taking discrete timepoint measurements
Recording data by hand or in spreadsheets
These methods are:
Labor-intensive
Low-throughput
Prone to human error
Poorly representative of real-world conditions
Yet they remain the backbone of qualification, regulatory, and R&D workflows.
Why this is a real problem (not just an inconvenience)
Hydrogels are highly dynamic materials. Their performance depends on:
Time
Fluid exchange
Mechanical constraint
Temperature
Chemistry of the surrounding environment
Measuring them with repetitive manual processes has been a severe bottleneck.
The result?
Noisy data
Poor reproducibility across labs
Slow iteration cycles
Late-stage failures that could have been caught earlier
High labor costs
In other words, we are trying to understand dynamic materials with static tools.
Mechanical testing hasn’t kept up either
Mechanical properties are just as critical as swelling or degradation, especially for wound care, tissue interfaces, and implantable systems.
Today, most hydrogel mechanical testing relies on rheometers:
Destructive or semi-destructive
Discrete measurements
Often divorced from the hydrated, in-use state of the material
These tools were not designed for long-term, non-destructive evaluation of soft, evolving materials. Yet we still treat their outputs as ground truth.
This is where GelTech comes in
At GelTech Labs, we’re building the next generation of hydrogel testing infrastructure.
Our platform, Carousel, automates core hydrogel assays including:
Swelling
Degradation
AUL
MVTR
Release
Instead of snapshots, Carousel captures continuous, high-resolution data under controlled, real-world-relevant conditions. This allows researchers and companies to evaluate how materials actually behave over time, not just how they look at isolated checkpoints.
And we’re not stopping there.
We’re also developing technologies for non-destructive, continuous mechanical testing of hydrogels — designed to evaluate mechanical performance as materials swell, degrade, and interact with their environment. The goal is not to marginally improve rheometers, but to replace them with tools built for soft, dynamic materials.
What modern hydrogel testing should look like
If hydrogels are going to reach their potential, testing needs to be:
Automated
Continuous
Reproducible across labs
Representative of real use conditions
Standards will eventually evolve, but innovation can’t wait decades for that to happen.
Hydrogels are 21st-century materials.
They deserve 21st-century testing.