ABSTRACT
Microbial infections are an increasing issue in biotechnology and medicine. With the worldwide increasing antibiotic resistance, research on the development of materials with antimicrobial activity is attracted today for biomedical applications. Recently, three-dimensional supermacroporous interconnected cryogels possess many attributes for varied applications, including biomedical fields. Cryogels are a class of hydrogels synthesized under zero conditions using natural and synthetic monomers or polymer precursors. Cryogels are nontoxic, biocompatible, mechanically stable, elastic, sponge-like structures with high water holding capacity. Due to these properties of cryogels, they can be used as wound dressings for wound healing, tissue compatible biomaterials in tissue engineering and as a carrier for drug delivery and cell separation applications. The interconnected pore structure of cryogels provided controlled release for drugs, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), metal ions and metallic nanoparticles. Providing a long-term antimicrobial effect is an important parameter for antimicrobial cryogels. The antimicrobial property of cryogels can be originated from used monomers/polymers for cryogel synthesis or cryogels can be loaded with antimicrobial agents. In this direction we classified antimicrobial cryogels as antimicrobial polymer-based cryogels to emphasize antimicrobial polymers and we classified antimicrobial cryogels as antimicrobial material loaded cryogels to emphasize and exemplify for loaded antimicrobial agents like metallic ions, metallic nanoparticles, drugs, AMPs and other antimicrobial agents. In this chapter, we focus on the importance and main advantages of antimicrobial cryogels in biomedical fields. We gathered and summarized recent studies of antimicrobial cryogels and outlined the parts that can be improved for future studies.
