Hydrogels for Exosome Delivery in Biomedical Applications

Abstract

Hydrogels, which are hydrophilic polymer networks, have attracted great attention, and significant advances in their biological and biomedical applications, such as for drug delivery, tissue engineering, and models for medical studies, have been made. Due to their similarity in physiological structure, hydrogels are highly compatible with extracellular matrices and biological tissues and can be used as both carriers and matrices to encapsulate cellular secretions. As small extracellular vesicles secreted by nearly all mammalian cells to mediate cell–cell interactions, exosomes play very important roles in therapeutic approaches and disease diagnosis. To maintain their biological activity and achieve controlled release, a strategy that embeds exosomes in hydrogels as a composite system has been focused on in recent studies. Therefore, this review aims to provide a thorough overview of the use of composite hydrogels for embedding exosomes in medical applications, including the resources for making hydrogels and the properties of hydrogels, and strategies for their combination with exosomes.

Modeling Tunable Fracture in Hydrogel Shell Structures for Biomedical Applications

“…These desirable properties can offset prevalent shortcomings in traditional drug-delivery materials, such as their high invasiveness, low efficiency, and intermittent local delivery [ 103 , 104 ]. To further promote the application of hydrogels in drug delivery, DNA hydrogels [ 105 ], and smart hydrogels [ 106 ] have also been recently developed. However, hydrogels are prone to fracture when interacting with the dynamic blood flow during the process of drug delivery [ 29 , 107 , 108 ], decreasing their success probability at the target.…”

Research progress of hydrogels as delivery systems and scaffolds in the treatment of secondary spinal cord injury

“…Recently, hydrogels have been used as delivery systems for SSCI. Hydrogels are divided into two groups according to the raw materials used: natural and synthetic hydrogels ( Xie et al, 2022 ). The former is composed of natural polymers, such as polysaccharides and peptides, while the latter is composed of synthetic hydrophilic polymers, including alcohols, acrylic acids, and their derivatives.…”

Recent progress of Bioinspired Hydrogel-based delivery system for endometrial repair

“…Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology frontiersin.org characteristic of hydrogel and the ability to controlled-release its embedded molecule, encapsulation of exosomes with hydrogel provide an outstanding candidate in plenty of treatments including bone and cartilage regeneration, cardiovascular diseases, spinal cord injury, periodontal and corneal repairs (Xie et al, 2022). Exosome has immense potential of treating injured endometrium by regulating EMT (Yao et al, 2019;Feng et al, 2020), miRNA (Tan et al, 2020;Shi et al, 2021), proliferation (Lv et al, 2020) and endometrium angiogenesis (Zhang et al, 2022).…”