A new review published in Nature Reviews Bioengineering argues that the next generation of medical electronics will not be built on flat, sealed chips but on soft, porous networks of fibres that let air, fluids and even cells pass straight through. The article, led by Zhizhi Wu, Yufei Zhang and Qiyao Huang of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University under the corresponding authorship of Zijian Zheng, surveys a rapidly growing field the authors call fibre-architected intelligent permeable bioelectronics, or FIPEB. Their central claim is deceptively simple: because living tissue is soft, wet and constantly remodelling itself, any electronic device that hopes to stay integrated with it for months or years must be mechanically compliant and must allow mass transport across the biointerface. Conventional rigid, impermeable devices fail on both counts, and the consequences are familiar to every clinician who has managed a failing implant.

The engineering logic behind permeability rests on well-established biology. When the body encounters an implanted material, the immune system mounts a foreign body response: proteins adsorb onto the surface, inflammatory cells arrive, and eventually a dense collagenous capsule walls the device off from surrounding tissue. That capsule degrades signal quality for electrodes, isolates sensors from the very biochemistry they are meant to measure, and can cause chronic irritation. Mechanical mismatch compounds the problem. Skin, muscle, brain and blood vessels deform continuously with motion, pulsation and growth, so a stiff slab of silicon or even a thin but airtight polymer film experiences shear stresses at its edges that promote delamination and tissue damage. Porous fibre networks sidestep both failure modes simultaneously, the review explains, because their open structure permits nutrient and waste exchange, supports cell proliferation at the interface in a controlled way, and distributes mechanical strain across millions of interlocking fibre contacts rather than concentrating it at a perimeter.

The authors organise the field around four governing parameters: permeability, conductivity, mechanical adaptability and biocompatibility. These are not independent. Increasing porosity generally improves mass transport and breathability but reduces the conductive cross-section available for electrical signals, so designers must trade one property against another. The review highlights materials strategies that break this trade-off, including liquid-metal fibre mats that remain conductive while stretching to 1,800 percent, silver-gold core-sheath nanowires that combine high conductivity with corrosion resistance, conductive hydrogels whose water-rich networks resemble soft tissue, and MXene-coated fibres that bring high capacitance to microelectrodes. Strain-insensitive conductor designs, such as buckled shells and built-in helical structures, decouple electrical resistance from mechanical deformation, allowing a fibre to stretch without its signal drifting. Zwitterionic coatings and antifouling polymers suppress nonspecific protein adsorption, while biomolecular functionalisation with fibronectin, collagen, laminin or RGD peptides can actively encourage desired cell adhesion and neurite extension.

Manufacturing is where fibre architecture reveals its most practical advantage, because the textile industry has spent centuries perfecting scalable ways to make, weave, knit, braid and coat fibres. The review divides fabrication into top-down and bottom-up routes. Top-down methods include in-textile photolithography, which patterns high-resolution interconnected metal circuits directly inside fabric while preserving stretchability and permeability, as well as screen printing, inkjet printing, dip coating and direct ink writing. Bottom-up approaches centre on electrospinning, which draws nanofibres from polymer solutions under high voltage and can produce mats with controlled hierarchical porosity, and on thermal drawing, coaxial spinning and wet spinning, which build multi-material fibres with core-sheath architectures. A metre-scale heterostructure printing method for high-toughness fibre electrodes, reported in 2025, exemplifies the push toward industrial throughput. The authors emphasise that combining the two families of techniques gives engineers control over structure from the nanometre to the metre, which is precisely the multiscale range over which biological tissues operate.

What elevates these devices from passive conductors to intelligent bioelectronics is the integration of sensing, actuation and therapy into the same fibre platform. On the sensing side, the review catalogues electrophysiological electrodes for electrocardiography, electromyography and electroencephalography, including knit band sensors that let amputees control prosthetic hands through surface EMG; biochemical sensors that track glucose in sweat through electrochemical reactions on functionalised fibres, or monitor amniotic fluid in real time during pregnancy; and biomechanical strain sensors that follow joint bending, respiration and ligament loading. Piezoelectric and triboelectric fibre systems convert body motion into electrical signals and even into power, while magnetoelastic soft fibres allow wireless readout. On the therapeutic side, fibre platforms deliver electrical stimulation, photothermal heating, optogenetic light and drugs. A bioabsorbable mechanoelectric fibre has been demonstrated as an electrical stimulation suture, and multifunctional microelectronic fibres have wirelessly modulated both gut and brain neural circuits in animal studies.

Perhaps the most clinically compelling vision the review describes is the closed-loop therapeutic platform, in which sensing and therapy are fused into a single feedback system. A skin-interfaced electronic wound bandage reported in 2025 combines three-dimensional sensing with targeted treatment, monitoring the wound environment and responding to it. A self-powered permeable electronic dressing manages exudate, applies electrostimulation and releases drugs for chronic wound healing. Liquid-metal stretchable bioelectronic fibres have been designed for electrical stimulation and drug delivery in minimally invasive cardiac therapy, and implantable optical fibres have delivered immunotherapeutics while simultaneously measuring tumour impedance. In such systems, the fibre network acts as both nervous system and hand of the therapist: it perceives a physiological state, computes or transmits the information, and intervenes, all while remaining permeable enough that the healing tissue grows into and around it rather than rejecting it.

Secondary features that sound mundane turn out to be decisive for real-world adoption. Washability, for instance, determines whether textile-based health monitors can survive the laundry, and the review notes that standardised testing protocols for wash fastness, mechanical fatigue and long-term biocompatibility are still missing but essential for regulatory translation. Optical transparency matters for devices that must not obstruct vision or clinical inspection, from gas-permeable contact lens sensors with metal-coated nanofibre meshes to transparent conductors that maintain stable conductivity under large deformation. Biodegradability opens a different design space: polycaprolactone and polylactic acid fibres can be engineered to degrade on predictable timescales, and biodegradable cotton-based piezoresistive textiles point toward devices that simply vanish when their job is done, eliminating a second surgery. The review also confronts the safety shadow hanging over fibrous biomaterials, namely the lessons of asbestos, where biopersistent fibres caused inflammation and carcinogenesis, and stresses that fibre dimensions, persistence and degradation chemistry must be controlled deliberately.

The translational pathway the authors sketch is candid about remaining obstacles. Long-term in vivo stability data for most fibre systems are limited compared with the decades of clinical experience behind conventional implants. Standardisation is immature: without agreed benchmarks for permeability, fatigue life, wash durability and biocompatibility, regulators and clinicians cannot compare devices on equal footing. Power and data remain bottlenecks for fully implantable systems, although fibre-shaped batteries, supercapacitors and biofuel cells, along with embroidered and liquid-metal antennas for wireless powering and communication, are closing the gap. There are also questions of scale-up economics, of sterilisation compatibility, and of the ethical dimensions of continuous physiological monitoring, from data privacy to the psychological burden of being measured around the clock. The review frames these not as reasons for scepticism but as a research agenda, arguing that the field’s rapid material progress has outpaced its testing infrastructure and that catching up is now the priority.

If the authors are right, the significance of fibre-architected permeable bioelectronics extends beyond any single device category. Digital health care depends on continuous, high-fidelity physiological data streams, and the quality of those streams is bounded by how well electronics can live with biology rather than merely sit on it. By making permeability a first-class design requirement alongside conductivity and compliance, the FIPEB framework reframes the biointerface as something to be engineered collaboratively with tissue rather than defended against it. The convergence of advanced soft materials, textile-scale manufacturing and closed-loop intelligence suggests a future in which a cardiac monitor is a comfortable garment, a neural interface is a thread-like probe the brain tolerates for years, and a wound dressing heals as it measures. The remaining distance between laboratory demonstrations and that future, the review concludes, will be covered not by any single breakthrough but by systematic engineering of the four properties, permeability chief among them, that let electronics and life finally share the same space.

Subject of Research: Fibre-architected permeable bioelectronics for long-term biointegrated sensing and therapy

Article Title: Fibre-architected intelligent permeable bioelectronics

Article References: Wu, Z., Zhang, Y., Huang, Q., & Zheng, Z. (2026). Fibre-architected intelligent permeable bioelectronics. Nature Reviews Bioengineering. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44222-026-00500-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44222-026-00500-z

Keywords: bioelectronics, permeable electronics, fibre architecture, wearable sensors, implantable devices, foreign body response, electrospinning, liquid metal conductors, closed-loop therapy, digital health care, biocompatibility, e-textiles