Algae: A natural active material for biomedical applications

Tremendous opportunities exist for biomaterials in biomedical applications. Microalgae, as a kind of natural resources, have been recently used novel biological materials, and attracted great deal interest this field. The unique morphological characteristics easily functionalized surfaces microalgae allow the attachment diagnostic or therapeutic agents on their surface, making them promising candidates construction biochemical probes, drug carriers scaffolds. As photosynthetic system with rich autofluorescent pigments, algae can improve local oxygen concentration by situ production perform imaging (fluorescence photoacoustic imaging), which widely studied diagnosis therapies hypoxia-associated diseases such solid tumors wounds. This review offers summary properties well recent developments applications bioanalysis, tissue engineering, tumor therapy wound healing. naturally abundant, low cost biocompatible material algae-based an exceptional potential commercial clinical practice.