Advances of Alginate-Based Hydrogels in Drug Delivery and Encapsulation Technologies

Dear Colleagues,

Hydrogels are a three-dimensional and crosslinked network of hydrophilic polymers. They can absorb a large amount of water or biological fluids, which leads to their swelling while maintaining their 3D structure without dissolving. Among the numerous polymers that have been utilized for the preparation of the hydrogels, polysaccharides have gained more attention in the area of pharmaceutics. Sodium alginate is a non-toxic, biocompatible, and biodegradable polysaccharide with several unique physicochemical properties; it has been used as delivery vehicles for drugs. Owing to their high-water content and natural soft tissue, hydrogels have been largely studied as a scaffold. The formation of hydrogels can occur by interactions of the anionic alginates with multivalent inorganic cations through a typical ionotropic gelation method. However, those applications require the control of some properties such as mechanical stiffness, swelling, degradation, cell attachment, and binding or release of bioactive molecules by using the chemical or physical modifications of the alginate.

This Special Issue explores the vital precepts, basic and fundamental aspects of alginates in pharmaceutical sciences, biopharmacology, and encapsulation in the biotechnology industry. The use of natural polymers in healthcare applications over synthetic polymers is becoming more prevalent due to natural polymers’ biocompatibility, biodegradability, economic extraction and ready availability. To fully utilize and harness the potential of alginates, this Special Issue presents a thorough understanding of the synthesis, purification, and characterization of alginates and their derivatives. This is a highly useful resource for pharmaceutical and biomedical scientists, health care professionals and regulatory scientists actively involved in the pharmaceutical product and process development of natural polymer containing drug delivery, as well as postgraduate students and postdoctoral research fellows in pharmaceutical sciences. The scope of this Special Issue covers novel alginate hydrogel-based systems equipped with nanotechnology with applications in drug delivery, disease modeling, tissue engineering, organs-on-chip, 3D bioprinting, flexible biosensing, and soft robotics, as well as their applications and the interface of these systems with drug screening, genomics, metabolomics, and proteomics for a better understanding of disease formation and progression. We accept original research articles, critical review papers, and commentaries.

Dr. Mallesh Kurakula
Prof. Dr. Vitaliy Khutoryanskiy
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Gels is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2100 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.