Nanoencapsulation is commonly used to improve nutritional properties, rheological behavior and flavor profile of phytochemicals. The particles commonly utilized to encapsulate the functional ingredients are natural polymers such as polysaccharides and proteins. There is an ever-growing interest for use of polysaccharides to encapsulate hydrophobic phytochemicals like curcumin. Curcumin is a pol...

Among novel drug delivery systems, Buccal mucoadhesive systems have attracted great attention in recent years due to their ability to adhere and remain on the oral mucosa and to release their drug content gradually. Mucoadhesion may be defined as the process where polymers attach to biological substrate or a synthetic or natural macromolecule, to mucus or an epithelial surface. Buccal mucoadhes...

In this chapter, we describe two methods for bio-producing recombinant repetitive polypeptide polymers for use in biomedical devices. These polymers, known as elastin-like recombinamers (ELRs), are derived from the repetition of selected amino acid domains of extracellular matrix proteins with the aim of recreating their mechanical and physiological features. The proteinaceous nature of ELRs al...

The present paper intends to overview a wide range of natural-origin polymers with special focus on proteins and polysaccharides (the systems more inspired on the extracellular matrix) that are being used in research, or might be potentially useful as carriers systems for active biomolecules or as cell carriers with application in the tissue engineering field targeting several biological tissue...

Nanoparticles have gained considerable attention in recent years as one of the most promising drug delivery systems owing to their unique potentials via combining the different characteristics of hydrophilicity and hydrophobicity with a nanoparticle (e.g., very small size). Several polymeric nanoparticulate systems have been prepared and characterized in recent years, based on both natural and ...

Polymers can be classified as synthetic polymers and natural polymers, and are often characterized by their most typical functions namely their high mechanical resistivity, electrical conductivity and dielectric properties. This bibliography report consists in: (i) Defining the origins of the dielectric properties of natural polymers by reviewing proteins. Despite their complex molecular chains...