Self-Assembling Hydrogel - A New Drug Delivery System

Hydrogels have been around for for quite some time now. And despite their utility, their toxic components, and use as drug carriers have been their popular shortcomings. However, recently a self-assembling version of the pharmaceutical raw material has been developed, which is claimed to be biocompatible.

If you are new to hydrogels, then simply put, it's a gel in which water is the continuous phase and it has a myriad medical and industrial applications.

Hydrogels have seen a number of developments over the years and the new research is the most recent advancement for using them as a pharmaceutical controlled drug delivery vehicles.

During the course of their study, instead to reinventing the wheel, researchers went about exploring means by which medically approved drugs can be converted into amphiphilic molecules which can self assemble. Finding new uses of the already approved pharmaceutical excipients seems to be a slick way to tackle the issue of the time it takes to get a new molecule or pharmaceutical ingredients approved.

And now the researchers' efforts have led them to develop structures capable of delivering high concentrations of pharmaceutical drugs minus the negative side effects. It still the beginning, an important one though, because this newly formulated pharmaceutical raw material can be a stepping stone for making drug-based delivery carriers which can release a number of drugs e.g. anti-inflammatory drugs.

This research also seems to be important as it might even help eliminate the need for an external carrier for as a means of drug delivery. Also this research conducted by scientists from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology (HST) will reportedly be published in the journal, Biomaterials.

Fred is a journalist with 7 years of experience. Though, as a professional He's reported on myriad topics, his favorite is the medical industry. Off late he's been working on different web portals including Themedica.com. Themedica is a comprehensive business-to-business (b2b) information portal and directory, featuring useful information for medical and health care industry professionals and businesses. It showcases resources such as trade shows, industry overviews, trade associations, global business listings, industry news, tenders, medical publications, informative articles and more that help professionals/businesses stay abreast with the latest and grow. He now blogs at Smiling Health