“…Due to the presence of chemical or physical crosslinking, they can make conventional change of volume in response with different pH values, namely swelling or deswelling in solvents of different pH values (Gupta et al, 2002;Kim & Peppas, 2003;Ranjha et al, 2008;Nguyen et al, 2009;Wang et al, 2010a). Therefore, they have more potential applications in drug delivery systems, especially oral drug delivery systems owning to the particularity of the physiological structure of the digestive tract (the pH in the upper gastrointestinal tract is relatively low, while in the lower gastrointestinal tract is higher) (Peppas et al, 2004;Sande, 2005;Guo & Gao, 2007;Wong, 2010;Chaturvedi et al, 2012;Yang et al, 2012).…”