Hydrogels for pharmaceutical and biomedical applications

Hydrogels are crosslinked hydrophilic polymer structures that can imbibe large amounts of water or biological fluids. Hydrogels are one of the upcoming classes of polymer-based systems that embrace numerous biomedical and pharmaceutical applications. This review discusses various parameters of hydrogels such as surface properties, water content and swelling behavior, effect of nature of polymer, ionic content, and thermodynamics, all of which can influence the biomedical usage of hydrogels. Meanwhile, intelligent or environment-sensitive hydrogels and bioadhesive hydrogels continue to be important materials for medical applications; therefore, a part of this review is devoted to some of their important classes. Hydrogels are extensively used for various biomedical applications--tissue engineering, molecular imprinting, wound dressings materials, immunoisolation, drug delivery, etc. Thus, this review aims to throw light on the numerous applications that hydrogels have in the biomedical arena.