Wound healing represents a major health burden and the variety of wound types has resulted in a wide range of wound dressings with new products frequently introduced to target different aspects of the wound healing process. These wound dressing biomaterials play an active role in the healing process, thus accelerating the process. An ideal dressing should achieve rapid healing at reasonable cos...

In landfills, deposited waste material is usually faced with strictly anoxic conditions. This means that the design of new biodegradable polymers must take into consideration that degradation should be possible especially in the absence of molecular oxygen. Poly-beta-hydroxybutyrate is depolymerized by the anaerobic fermenting bacterium Ilyobacter delafieldii through an extracellular hydrolase....

One multifunctional small molecule can undergo a natural condensation reaction under the control of reducing agent to generate amphiphilic oligomers which quickly self-assemble supramolecular nanoparticles or form crosslinked, reversibly degradable polymers.

The ability to deliver drugs to the human colon in a specific manner has become feasible over the years. Targeting pharmaceutical drugs to the colon makes it possible to achieve local or systemic drug delivery to this site. To deliver the compounds in a non-degraded form to the lower part of the gastrointestinal tract, they must first of all pass through the stomach, the upper part of the intes...

The purpose of the present study is to prepare different combinations of drug Simvastatin (SV) with different polymers like Sodium alginate (SA), Hydroxypropylmethylcellulose (HPMC), Pectin (P), Dillenia (D) and Hydroxy propyl βcyclodextrin. (HPC), thereby determine and report any possible interactions between the drug Simvastatin (SV) and various polymers both from natural and synthetic source...

Host-defense peptides (HDPs) are produced by eukaryotes to defend against bacterial infection, and diverse synthetic polymers have recently been explored as mimics of these natural peptides. HDPs are rich in both hydrophobic and cationic amino acid residues, and most HDP-mimetic polymers have therefore contained binary combinations of hydrophobic and cationic subunits. However, HDP-mimetic poly...

In the past two decades, many polymers have been proposed for producing immunoprotective capsules. Examples include the natural polymers alginate, agarose, chitosan, cellulose, collagen, and xanthan and synthetic polymers poly(ethylene glycol), polyvinyl alcohol, polyurethane, poly(ether-sulfone), polypropylene, sodium polystyrene sulfate, and polyacrylate poly(acrylonitrile-sodium methallylsul...

New polymers were synthesized from α-hydroxy acids derived from the natural amino acids Ile, Leu, Phe, and Val, combined with lactic acid, glycolic acid and 6-hydroxyhexanoic acid by direct condensation. The toxicity was determined and the degradation process of these polyesters was investigated under physiological conditions by analyzing the composition of the degraded polymers and the oligome...

During the past two decades significant advances have been made in the development of biodegradable polymeric materials for biomedical applications. Degradable polymeric biomaterials are preferred candidates for developing therapeutic devices such as temporary prostheses, three-dimensional porous structures as scaffolds for tissue engineering and as controlled/sustained release drug delivery ve...