Tissue-adhesive and highly mechanical double-network hydrogel for cryopreservation and sustained release of anti-cancer drugs
Liangdan Zeng, Jingjing He, Yang Cao, Jiaxian Wang, Ziwen Qiao, Xiancai Jiang, Linxi Hou, Jin Zhang
Abstract
Applications of hydrogels served as drug carriers are severely limited by several main drawbacks of instable network structure, weak mechanical strength, shortage of tissue-adhesive ability, as well as poor anti-frozen performance, especially for some anti-cancer drugs (e.g., lomustine) those should be stored at subzero temperature to maintain their bioactivity. In the present work, a kind of hybrid polyacrylamide/alginate-CaCl2 (PAAm/Alg-Ca) based double-network (DN) hydrogel presented high tensile strength of 61.81 ± 5.14 kPa, a low water contact angle of 22.5° ± 0.8°, and sufficient adhesion on various wet substrates (234.56 ± 8.55 Pa). More interestingly, pH-responsive swelling behavior, excellent cold-resistance, as well as efficient recoverability at a low temperature of −20 °C was shown in such hydrogel. On the basis of biocompatibility result and a sustained drug release behavior using lomustine as a testing model, our proposed PAAm/Alg-Ca based DN hydrogel paves the way for development of anti-cancer drugs cryopreservation and delivery vehicle.