Nanofiber-laden hydrogels for biomedical applications

Abstract

Hydrogels are widely used in biomedical engineering, most notably as drug delivery systems, cell culture scaffolds and biosensors. Mechanical properties of hydrogels are generally controlled by the crosslinking density of the polymeric network. But this inevitably leads to significant changes in their permeability. To resolve this issue, the strategy of incorporating short nanofibers into the hydrogels is employed. This allowed the control of mechanics only with a small amount of nanofibers without changing the polymer concentration. Furthermore, new functionalities could be introduced to the hydrogels by incorporating nanofibers prepared using various types of functional polymers.