Resumen de Smart hydrogels based on 1,3,5-triazines for hydrophobic drug delivery applications
The current thesis is framed within the design of novel smart hydrogels as drug delivery vehicles with the aim to tackle the current drawbacks of conventional hydrogel drug administration.
Hydrogels are hydrophilic materials in their vast majority and thus their use for delivery of drugs in the organism is narrowed down to water-soluble drugs. For this reason, both the uptake and delivery of hydrophobic drugs from the hydrogels is insufficient. The research carried out in this thesis addresses these issues and focuses on the design of hydrophobic hydrogels with the capability to incorporate drugs of poor water-solubility in an efficient manner. Further, the materials developed in this research enhanced the release of these drugs in vitro in response to a variety of external stimuli. In addition, the hydrogels resulted bio-compatible in the presence of human cell lines.
In summary, this work presents a novel bio-compatible hydrogel with the ability to incorporate hydrophobic drugs and deliver them under external innocuous stimuli. The materials contribute to expand the scope of the hydrogels towards more poor water-soluble drugs, such as anti-cancer agents, which are vastly hydrophobic, and thus can find interesting applications in 3D tissue engineering.
