Synthesis and degradation of agar‐carbomer based hydrogels for tissue engineering applications |
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| Authors: | Filippo Rossi Xanthippi Chatzistavrou Giuseppe Perale Aldo R Boccaccini |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering “Giulio Natta”, Politecnico di Milano, Via Mancinelli 7, 20131 Milano, Italy;2. Department of Materials, Imperial College London, Prince Consort Rd., London SW7 2BP, UK;3. Institute of Biomaterials, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Erlangen‐Nuremberg, 91058 Erlangen, Germany |
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| Abstract: | Hydrogels studied in this investigation, synthesized starting from agarose and Carbomer 974P, were chosen for their potential use in tissue engineering. The strong ability of hydrogels to mimic living tissues should be complemented with optimized degradation time profiles: a critical property for biomaterials but essential for the integration with target tissue. In this study, chosen hydrogels were characterized both from a rheological and a structural point of view before studying the chemistry of their degradation, which was performed by several analysis: infrared bond response Fourier transform infrared (FT‐IR)], calorimetry differential scanning Calorimetry (DSC)], and % mass loss. Degradation behaviors of Agar‐Carbomer hydrogels with different degrees of crosslinkers were evaluated monitoring peak shifts and thermal property changes. It was found that the amount of crosslinks heavily affect the time and the magnitude related to the process. The results indicate that the degradation rates of Agar‐Carbomer hydrogels can be controlled and tuned to adapt the hydrogel degradation kinetics for different cell housing and drug delivery applications. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2011 |
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| Keywords: | hydrogels degradation FT‐IR scaffold tissue engineering |
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