Injectable Hydrogels for Localized Cancer Therapy

Abstract

Traditional intravenous chemotherapy is relative to many systemic side effects, including myelosuppression, liver or kidney dysfunction, and neurotoxicity. As an alternative method, the injectable hydrogel can efficiently avoid these problems by releasing drugs topically at the tumor site. With advantages of localized drug toxicity in the tumor site, proper injectable hydrogel as the drug delivery system has become a research hotspot. Based on different types and stages of cancer, a variety of hydrogel drug delivery systems were developed, including thermosensitive, pH-sensitive, photosensitive, and dual-sensitive hydrogel. In this review, the latest developments of these hydrogels and related drug delivery systems were summarized. In summary, our increasing knowledge of injectable hydrogel for localized cancer therapy ensures us that it is a more durable and effective approach than traditional chemotherapy. Smart release system reacting to different stimuli at different time according to the micro-environment changes in the tumor site is a promising tendency for further studies.

Temperature‐Responsive Low Molecular Weight Ionic Liquid Based Gelator: An Approach to Fabricate an Anti‐Cancer Drug‐Loaded Hybrid Ionogel

“…[21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28] A systematic review by Fan et al on the temperature responsive injectable hydrogel based delivery systems that proposes a durable and effective approach for localized cancer therapy than the traditional chemotherapy is recently appeared in the literature. [29] Recently, we have reported novel ester functionalized IL as the new age gelator that undergoes temperature induced phase transition (opaque to transparent) and exhibited excellent dye absorbing and drug encapsulating properties. [21][22] Through modulating structural entity of these gelators, one can fine tune the physicochemical properties of the gels and their applications.…”

Doxorubicin Loaded Poloxamer Thermosensitive Hydrogels: Chemical, Pharmacological and Biological Evaluation

“…In cancer drug delivery research, it is especially interesting to link release data with in vivo drug retention data, since it could provide information where the drug might sequester after injection [ 15 , 16 ]. Parallel to the growing interests for slow release systems, an increasing number of studies has underscored the promises of local cancer therapy [ 17 ]. As such, it is of great interest to carefully monitor in vivo drug retention.…”

Physical Organohydrogels With Extreme Strength and Temperature Tolerance

“…Hydrogels are the typical soft materials, by virtue of their great potentials in applications spanning from soft robotics, sensors, actuators to tissue engineering (Wegst et al, 2014;Iwaso et al, 2016;Kim et al, 2016;Banerjee et al, 2018;Dong et al, 2018;Hu et al, 2019). Nevertheless, conventional hydrogels are considered to be mechanically weak due to lack of an effective energy dissipation mechanism or intrinsic structural heterogeneity (Dhivya et al, 2015;Yuk et al, 2016), limiting utilization in some fields that require excellent mechanical properties (Gao et al, 2016;Fan et al, 2019;Lai et al, 2019). Therefore, improving mechanical properties of hydrogels became an important research hotspot.…”