Functional Hydrogels for Biomedical Applications

Dear Colleagues,

This special issue on “Functional Hydrogels for Biomedical Applications” is dedicated to recent developments in the synthesis, design, tailoring, and fabrication of hydrogels for applications in biomedical fields. Hydrogels are three-dimensional hydrophilic polymeric networks that have the ability to absorb large volumes of water. The inherent biocompatibility, stiffness, porosity, biodegradability, flexibility, and versatility of hydrogels closely mimics the tissue environment. These properties make hydrogels excellent material for biomedicine and tissue regeneration applications such as drug delivery, biosensors, bio-adhesives, cell culture platforms, wound dressings, contact lenses, and scaffolds for regeneration of hard and soft tissues. Despite, their potential, the applications of hydrogels in biomedicines and biotechnologies are limited due to their poor mechanical properties, hard processability, low tunability, and lack of multifunctionality. Although various strategies has been explored to understand, tune and develop advanced hydrogels with superior mechanical properties and multifunctionalities, such as hybrid polymers, nanocomposite hydrogels, stimuli-responsive materials (e.g., pH, light, electricity, and temperature), and degradable polymers, as well as bioconjugation chemistries for reversible crosslinking to make hydrogels self-healing, injectable and suitable for post-processing and additive manufacturing; still many synthetic and design aspects are left to discover. We hope that this special issue will stimulate new research and strategies to enhance hydrogels´ material properties, processability, and dynamic functionalities, to fully unlock the potential and translation of hydrogels in biomedical and clinical applications. We look forward to new studies ranging from the synthesis of new or hybrid polymers, the design of smart or functional hydrogels, computation or characterization of their tunable properties, and advanced manufacturing techniques to fabricate implantable biomaterial scaffolds. We will welcome the submission of both theoretical and experimental results.

Dr. Aleeza Farrukh
Dr. Roshna Vakkeel
Guest Editors

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