ABSTRACT
Pharmaceutical and biomedical application of hydrophilic materials has emerged as one of the most significant trends in the area of nanotechnology. “Intelligent” polymeric devices able to undergo morphological modifications in response to an internal or external stimulus, such as pH, redox balance, temperature, magnetic field, and light have been actively pursued. In an effort to further improve the performances of the biomedical device, novel dual and multistimuli-responsive hydrogels responding to a combination of two or more signals have recently been developed by incorporating different stimulus-responsive elements into a network via polymerization processes. Notably, these combined responses take place either simultaneously at the pathological site, or sequentially from hydrogel preparation, hydrogel transporting pathways, to cellular compartments. These dual and multistimuli-responsive polymeric materials lead to superior in vitro and/or in vivo therapeutic efficacy, with programmed site-specific feature and remarkable potential for targeted therapy. This entry highlights the recent developments in the synthesis of dual and multistimuli-responsive hydrogels for applications in the biomedical and pharmaceutical fields, with a particular focus on the correlation between the hydrogel physical feature and the precision situ-controlled delivery of bioactive compounds.
