Engineering Biodegradable Polymers to Control Their Degradation and Optimize Their Use as Delivery and Theranostic Systems

What is it about?

Biodegradable polymers are widely used for bio medical applications since their capacity to degrade under physiological conditions reduces the cumulative impact of toxins. Th ese materials have been tested for the preparation of delivery systems for pharmaceutical compounds or as therapeutic and diagnostic tools. The aim of this chapter is to put in evidence the evolution of nano structured biodegradable polymer approaches in pharmaceutical and biomedical applications. The chapter starts with an introduction concerning the applicability of biodegradable polymers in nanotechnology; the following sections are focused on the development of different nanostructured biopolymers: bionanocomposites, polymeric nanoparticles, and nanoshells. In the last section the strategies to obtain polymer nanosystems able to give optical signals in order to track material evolution and degradation over time are presented. In particular, the preparation methods of engineered materials able to generate fl uorescence are described in detail, with a special emphasis on the experimental criteria chosen to obtain detectable, sensitive or tunable emission signals. Examples of cutting-edge applications in biomedical engineering based on fluorescent polymers are discussed.

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