Chapter 5 - Tailor-made polysaccharide-based hydrogels for biomedical applications

Abstract

Hydrogels, 3D polymeric networks with high water absorption ability, have become very popular materials in the biomedical field due to their special properties. They are soft, wet, nontoxic, biocompatible, and biodegradable matrices, which can be tunable in porosity, pore sizes, swelling capacity, and stiffness depending on their biomedical applications. Additionally, they can present properties as stimuli responsive and self-healing. Hydrogels can be composed of polymers natural, synthetic, or a combination of both. Special attention has taken in the varied collection of polysaccharides because they can maintain their intrinsic bioactivities and present a vast number of functional groups. Based on that, many tailor-made polysaccharides have been used to fabricate hydrogels as drug delivery systems, wound dressings, scaffolds for tissue engineering, and biosensors. Generally, modifications such as carboxymethylation, oxidation, amination, thiolation, maleilation, quaternization, and more are made to get the desired structural characteristics and to allow the functionalization of biomedical hydrogels.