Recent developments in all-polysaccharide hydrogels: Synthesis, properties, and biomedical applications

Their benign nature, polyfunctionality, inherently low toxicity, biodegradability, compatibility in certain situations, and low tendency to elicit strong immune responses make all-polysaccharide hydrogels attractive biomaterials. All-polysaccharide hydrogels may also exhibit other useful properties that are beneficial for biomedical use such as injectability, self-healing, tunable mechanical properties, stimuli-responsiveness, and more importantly, the absence of toxic byproducts upon degradation. To realize this potential, researchers have functionalized polysaccharides with various moieties that enable fabrication of all-polysaccharide hydrogels crosslinked by different methods. This review discusses recent developments in all-polysaccharide hydrogels including physical and covalent crosslinking strategies, hydrogel properties, and the various ways by which these properties are tuned. Furthermore, biomedical applications of all-polysaccharide hydrogels are summarized, and we provide our future perspective.