Stammen, Jason A., Stephen Williams, David N. Ku, and Robert E. Guldberg. “Mechanical properties of a novel PVA hydrogel in shear and unconfined compression.” Biomaterials 22, no. 8 (2001): 799-806.
Our company actually worked on a product using polyvinyl alcohol gels. The group that published the paper above came up with the gel (polyvinyl alcohol, for use as cartilage replacement); we paid them money for their biocompatibility data.
My job was to extrude the gel into a long string of various diameters to be cut up and used as a plug. So I used a freezing anti-solvent as a coagulation bath. The result was a string so strong you could not break it (PVA hydrogen bonds like crazy).
This was sometime around 2004 or 2005. As you see the publication was from 2001.
It would be quite something if this new polyvinyl alcohol gel described here makes it to the market. All kinds of snags lie along the way: marketing, product durability under load, chronic toxicity, physician acceptance, etc.
By the way neither the Georgia Tech group nor our company ever marketed the gel. Now our company is in a completely different area of medicine.
Spiderman's web!...........................