Engineering hydrogels for modulation of material-cell interactions

Abstract

Hydrogels are a recurrent platform for Tissue Engineering (TE) strategies. Their versatility and the variety of available methods for tuning their properties highly contribute to hydrogelsâ success. As a result, the design of advanced hydrogels has been thoroughly studied, in the quest for better solutions not only for drugs- and cell-based therapies but also for more fundamental studies. The wide variety of sources, crosslinking strategies, and functionalization methods, and mostly the resemblance of hydrogels to the natural extracellular matrix, make this 3D hydrated structures an excellent tool for TE approaches. The state-of-the-art information regarding hydrogel design, processing methods, and the influence of different hydrogel formulations on the final cell-biomaterial interactions are overviewed herein.