Poly(2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate) (pHEMA) is a polymer that forms a hydrogel in water. It was invented by Drahoslav Lim and Otto Wichterle for biological use. Together they succeeded in preparing a cross-linking gel which absorbed up to 40% of water, exhibited suitable mechanical properties and was transparent. They patented this material in 1953.
Poly(2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate) (pHEMA) is a polymer that forms a hydrogel in water. It was invented by Drahoslav Lim and Otto Wichterle for biological use. Together they succeeded in preparing a cross-linking gel which absorbed up to 40% of water, exhibited suitable mechanical properties and was transparent. They patented this material in 1953.
==Synthesis== pHEMA hydrogel for intraocular lenses can be synthesized by solution polymerization using 2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate (HEMA) as raw material, ammonium persulfate and sodium pyrosulfite (APS/SMBS) as catalyst, and triethyleneglycol dimethacrylate (TEGDMA) as cross-linking additive.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).