Nanogel: a versatile bioactive drug delivery system
Drug delivery system (DDS) is the method or process of administering a pharmaceutical compound to achieve a therapeutic effect inside the human body. Nanogels, a nano-sized hydrogel-like polymeric material, has gained increasing attention for their application as drug delivery carriers due to their excellent colloidal stability in water, tunable chemical and physical structures, good mechanical properties, high loading capability, and good biocompatibility. This thesis developed a versatile drug delivery system based on nanogels. In Chapter I, a brief introduction on drug delivery systems is given and the features of nanogels as DDS are discussed. Chapter II discusses the synthesis and properties of nanogels, the current state-of-art in the field of nanogels in terms of efficiency and applicability for combating infections in the biomedical field are addressed. In Chapter III, a multimodal nanogel was developed to selectively allow molecular conjugated species to either be released inside the cell or remain connected to the polymer network selected by the intracellular environment. Chapter IV describes the development of a hydrophobic antimicrobial agent loaded nanogel for combating planktonic bacteria. Chapter V provides a stable hierarchical nanogel–GelMA composite hydrogel system by covalently embedding nanogels inside the network of GelMA hydrogel. Although this thesis has probed different application potentials of nanogels, there is still some work to do to bring nanogel to the clinical application. The limitation that holds back the process will be discussed in Chapter VI.