Stimuli‐responsive hydrogels: Fabrication and biomedical applications

TLDR

Hydrogels, bio‑inspired networks that mimic extracellular matrix, are increasingly used in soft robotics, regenerative medicine, and other bio‑applications, and stimuli‑responsive variants can alter phase, stiffness, or biochemical properties in response to single or multiple triggers for sensing, drug delivery, tissue engineering, and wound healing. This review surveys typical synthetic and natural gelators—small molecules and polymers—that serve as building blocks for functional stimuli‑responsive hydrogel architectures. It details fabrication strategies ranging from supramolecular assembly to dynamic covalent bonding, and discusses how various physical, chemical, endogenous, and exogenous stimuli elicit responses through specific design principles. Examples from bionic devices, wound dressings, and cargo carriers illustrate the benefits and opportunities of these hydrogels, while the review also outlines current challenges and future prospects for translating fundamental research into clinical applications.

Abstract

Abstract Due to their similarity to some bio‐architectures, for example, extracellular matrix, hydrogels are considered as bio‐inspired networks with bio‐mimetic and bio‐functional properties. With natural cytocompatibility and biocompatibility, hydrogels nowadays are more and more involved in various bio‐applications including shape morphing, artificial muscles, soft robotics, regenerative medicine, and so on. As an important subclass, stimuli‐responsive hydrogels have been attracting interest within decades. In response to single or multi‐triggers in biological microenvironment, stimuli‐responsive hydrogels can undergo phase transition, stiffness change, or biochemical properties activation, which make them intriguing biomaterials with broad applications including sensing, drug delivery, tissue engineering, and wound healing. This review presents typical synthetic and natural gelators comprising small molecules and polymers as building blocks of functional architectures. The fabrication strategies of hydrogels varied from supramolecular assembly to dynamic covalent binding are detailed. Various exogenous or endogenous, physical or chemical, and synthetic or natural stimuli together with response mechanism, design principle are demonstrated. Through recent examples from different perspectives, such as bionic devices, wound dressing, and cargo carrier, the benefits and opportunities of stimuli‐responsive hydrogels for biological applications are highlighted. Finally, the current challenges and future prospects in view of translation from fundamental researches to clinical application are briefly discussed.