Natural Polymers and Their Processing: Bottlenecks to Overcome Their Limitations in Medical Applications

Abstract

Natural polymers are widely known and extensively studied, especially for applications involving biomaterials and medical devices. Such a market has a high-growth potential, associated with the increase in people's average lifetime and the crescent concern for health and prevention by the population worldwide. In spite of this, few products within the medical field made from natural polymers are manufactured on large scale and commercialized. This review aims to provoke a reflection on why there is a missing chain link between the study of these materials and their large-scale production. If there are plenty of research papers published about biopolymers, why are they not available in the market? Initially, we present general statistics about the most commonly studied natural polymers and their applications in the medical field. We then review and analyze the three main processes (in our opinion) involving the production of biomaterials: 3D printing, drying, and sterilization. We present a description of the main processing methods, focusing on the major difficulties and bottlenecks that these processes may present during their use and scale-up. Our main conclusion is that more effort and focus are needed from scientists, in particular chemical and material engineers, to integrate material science with unit operations and close the gap between research and industrial production of natural polymers. This way, we can finally bring decades of development in biopolymers to real-life applications.