Abstract
Regenerative medicine seeks to assess how materials fundamentally affect cellular functions to improve retaining, restoring, and revitalizing damaged tissues and cancer therapy. As potential candidates in regenerative medicine, hydrogels have attracted much attention due to mimicking of native cell-extracellular matrix (ECM) in cell biology, tissue engineering, and drug screening over the past two decades. In addition, hydrogels with a high capacity for drug loading and sustained release profile are applicable in drug delivery systems. Recently, self-healing supramolecular hydrogels, as a novel class of biomaterials, are being used in preclinical trials with benefits such as biocompatibility, native tissue mimicry, and injectability via a reversible crosslink. Meanwhile, the localized therapeutics agent delivery is beneficial due to the ability to deliver more doses of therapeutic agents to the targeted site and the ability to overcome post-surgical complications, inflammation, and infections. These highly potential materials can help address the limitations of current drug delivery systems and the high clinical demand for customized drug release systems. To this aim, the current review presents the state-of-the-art progress of multifunctional and self-healable hydrogels for a broad range of applications in cancer therapy, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine.
Highlights
Tissue engineering offers alternative ways to address the current challenges associated with autologous grafts by developing highly porous biomaterials and scaffolds to encapsulate cells that spread and reorganize into tissue-like architectures to replace damaged tissues [1,2]
The results demonstrated that cell viability and cell metabolism in the samples with a low concentration of cellulose nanofibers (CNFs) (CS–CNF1/2) was higher compared to high CNF content samples (CS–CNF3 and CS–CNF4) and pristine CS hydrogel (Figure 9A) [93]
This review has provided a glimpse of the numerous applications of self-healing hydrogels as biomaterials, which are highly desirable because of useful advantages such as recovering their shape and mechanical properties after damage, moldability, and smooth injectability applications
Summary
Polymers 2021, 13, 2680 with self-healing properties, which means the capability of the material to recover its initial structure after being damaged [18,19] This phenomenon is like the same healing process of natural organisms via the reversibility of dynamic covalent crosslinks without an external stimulus, e.g., low pH, enzymatic environment, electric fields, temperatures, and UV light [20]. These hydrogels mimic the 3D ECM to regenerate after minor injuries similar to native tissues. The current main challenges and issues to apply hydrogels as scaffolds for drug or biologic agent delivery to maintain, regenerate, and modify lost or damaged tissues are discussed and summarized
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