ABSTRACT
The existence and applications of hydrogels have been reported for half a century or more. Nowadays, hydrogels have a lot of applications in different fields from industrial to biological. There are various papers, reviews, and monographs addressing the synthesis process, properties, and various applications of hydrogels in different fields. By modifying the basic structure, hydrogels are made to be applicable in a vast range of applications such as drug delivery systems, tissue engineering, integrated nanochannels, dye removal, scaffolds, contact lenses, biosensors, etc. Hydrogels are smart and tunable materials with many abilities consisting of a flexible polymeric structure for holding huge amount of water and other fluids, expanding their applications rapidly. Hydrogels are considered highly eco-friendly, possessing amazing biocompatibility and biodegradability. They can respond to a specific stimulus like pH, light, temperature, etc. and are pivotal in environmental and biological perspectives.
Particularly, the development of injectable hydrogels (IHs) as a whole network system has revolutionized biomedical applications (e.g. articular cartilage replacement). Further, nanocomposite hydrogels are of great importance in controlled delivery systems due to specific entrapment interactions of drug molecules into nanogel networks. All this focused the involvement of different technologies for hydrogels fabrication with timely increased hydrogel applications in the modern era. This chapter covers the nanobiotechnological aspects and several applications of nanotechnology-incorporated hydrogels in medical fields based on old and recent literatures.
