Development of Stimuli-Responsive Polymers for Smart Hydrogels Production
A special issue of Polymers (ISSN 2073-4360). This special issue belongs to the section "Polymer Applications".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 April 2023) | Viewed by 8158
Special Issue Editor
Interests: natural polymers; polysaccharides, hydrogels; scaffold; polymer characterization, tissue engineering, biofabrication techniques.
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Hydrogels represent gold-standard devices for several biomedical applications, ranging form drug delivery to tissue engineering. Hydrogels can be formulated initially from different natural-derived and synthetic macromolecules that can be “ad hoc”designed to provide the derived hydrated three-dimensional networks with peculiar physicochemical features, which may vary depending on the external stimuli coming from the native tissues or from an external, on-demand, activable source. Furthermore, stimuli-responsive features can be provided by doping the hydrogels with advanced nanosystems with the intrinsic ability to respond to different environmental conditions or external stimuli. In this way, the hydrogel can “adapt” itself to the surrounding administration site or can facilitate the finely tunable release of bioactive molecules.
Smart hydrogels are nowadays proposed also as costituents of platforms for biosensoring in diagnostics thanks to their ability to respond to biochemical stimuli and generate specific signals. Nonetheless, the smart properties of these systems can be exploited to perform advanced fabrication techniques such as 3D printing or to produce minimally invasive injectable systems that then enable the formation of therapeutic tools once in contact with the body.
In recent years, the number of publications focusing on smart hydrogels as the principal topic has increased dramatically, demonstrating the enormous interest aroused by these systems within the scientific community, which can be explained by the awareness of the huge impact that they are anticipated to have on the development of innovative biomedical devices.
In this Special Issue, we aim to collect original research that deals with the development of smart hydrogels.
We will consider those manuscripts that describe the production of stimuli-responsive macromolecules or three-dimensional smart nanocomposites whose peculiar behaviour could be useful for biomedical applications.
Dr. Calogero Fiorica
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- Stimuli-responsive macromolecules
- Smart hydrogels for drug delivery
- Smart hydrogels for tissue engineering
- Nanocomposite
- Smart injectable hydrogel
- Biofabrication techniques
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