title: Bioactive factor delivery strategies from engineered polymer hydrogels for therapeutic medicine.
abstract: Polymer hydrogels have been widely explored as therapeutic delivery matrices because of their ability to present sustained, localized and controlled release of bioactive factors. Bioactive factor delivery from injectable biopolymer hydrogels provides a versatile approach to treat a wide variety of diseases, to direct cell function and to enhance tissue regeneration. The innovative development and modification of both natural-(e.g., alginate (ALG), chitosan, hyaluronic acid (HA), gelatin, heparin (HEP), etc.) and synthetic-(e.g., polyesters, polyethyleneimine (PEI), etc.) based polymers has resulted in a variety of approaches to design drug delivery hydrogel systems from which loaded therapeutics are released. This review presents the state-of-the-art in a wide range of hydrogels that are formed though self-assembly of polymers and peptides, chemical crosslinking, ionic crosslinking and biomolecule recognition. Hydrogel design for bioactive factor delivery is the focus of the first section. The second section then thoroughly discusses release strategies of payloads from hydrogels for therapeutic medicine, such as physical incorporation, covalent tethering, affinity interactions, on demand release and/or use of hybrid polymer scaffolds, with an emphasis on the last 5 years.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Case Western Reserve University, 204 Wickenden, 10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106, USA.
authors.forename: Minh Khanh
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Nguyen
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Case Western Reserve University, 204 Wickenden, 10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106, USA ; Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Case Western Reserve University, 204 Wickenden, 10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106, USA.
authors.forename: Eben
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Alsberg
keywords: Bioactive molecules; Controlled release; Polymeric biomaterial; Polymerization; Release mechanism