Biodegradable Thermogelling Polymers: Working Towards Clinical Applications

As society ages, aging medical problems such as organ damage or failure among senior citizens increases, raising the demand for organ repair technologies. Synthetic materials have been developed and applied in various parts of human body to meet the biomedical needs. Hydrogels, in particular, have found extensive applications as wound healing, drug delivery and controlled release, and scaffold materials in the human body. The development of the next generation of soft hydrogel biomaterials focuses on facile synthetic methods, efficacy of treatment, and tunable multi-functionalities for applications. Supramolecular 3D entities are highly attractive materials for biomedical application. They are assembled by modules via various non-covalent bonds (hydrogen bonds, p-p stacking and/or van der Waals interactions). Biodegradable thermogels are a class of such supramolecular assembled materials. Their use as soft biomaterials and their related applications are described in this Review.