Recent Strategies to Develop Polysaccharide‐Based Nanomaterials for Biomedical Applications

Abstract

Polysaccharides are abundant in nature, renewable, nontoxic, and intrinsically biodegradable. They possess a high level of functional groups including hydroxyl, amino, and carboxylic acid groups. These functional groups can be utilized for further modification of polysaccharides with small molecules, polymers, and crosslinkers; the modified polysaccharides have been used as effective building blocks in fabricating novel biomaterials for various biomedical applications such as drug delivery carriers, cell-encapsulating biomaterials, and tissue engineering scaffolds. This review describes recent strategies to modify polysaccharides for the development of polysaccharide-based biomaterials; typically self-assembled micelles, crosslinked microgels/nanogels, three-dimensional hydrogels, and fibrous meshes. In addition, the outlook is briefly discussed on the important aspects for the current and future development of polysaccharide-based biomaterials, particularly tumor-targeting intracellular drug delivery nanocarriers.

Polysaccharide-based nanoparticles for theranostic nanomedicine

“…In addition to the small molecular compounds, hydrophobic polymers have been conjugated into carbohydrates by numerous approaches [67–69]. The polymer-grafted carbohydrates have been extensively prepared through “grafting from” or “grafting to” approaches.…”

“…For chemical crosslinking, the reactive functional groups in carbohydrates have been reacted with small molecular or polymeric crosslinkers. The direct chemical crosslinking of bare carbohydrates, however, often produce large NPs with broad size distribution because of inter-particular reactions [69, 92]. In addition, although chemically crosslinked NPs have high colloidal stability, conventional non-cleavable crosslinks within the NPs may act as diffusion barriers that hamper controlled drug release at the target site.…”

Intracellular delivery cellulose-based bionanogels with dual temperature/pH-response for cancer therapy

“…Toward successful tumor-targeting applications of BNGs, however, a critical challenge to be addressed is the slow and uncontrolled release of encapsulated drugs from BNGs [33]. The rapid release of cargoes is highly desired for cancer treatment [34,35].…”

Redox-responsive cellulose-based thermoresponsive grafted copolymers and in-situ disulfide crosslinked nanogels

“…The aggregates are formed driven from aqueous micellization through self-assembly of polysaccharidebased grafted copolymers. A number of approaches have been explored; most approaches utilize the presence of a plenty of functional groups including hydroxyl (OH), carboxylic acid (COOH), and amine (NH 2 ) groups of polysaccharides to be modified with functional (co)polymers [9]. Either hydrophobic polymers or hydrophilic, stimuli-responsive polymers have been grafted from/to polysaccharide backbones through well-established click-type reactions [10e13] or polymerization techniques such as ring opening polymerization [14e16] and controlled radical polymerization [17,18].…”