Injectable, Self-Healing, and Stress Sustainable Hydrogel of BSA as a Functional Biocompatible Material for Controlled Drug Delivery in Cancer Cells

Hydrogels have been used in the literature in tissue engineering, in drug delivery, and as enzyme biomimics. Herein, we report the synthesis of a functional biomaterial using BSA as scaffold and epichlorohydrin as cross-linker. The hydrogels reported in this paper were shown to exhibit tunable pore size as a function of BSA concentration by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and, therefore, are well suited to encapsulate drug molecules for delivery applications. These are injectable, shear thinning, self-healing, and has the ability to withstand a physical weight of ∼300 times of its own. In trypsin medium, the gel is degraded by 50% in 36 h supporting that these are biodegradable. The loading of Dox by the gel was confirmed by the emission of red fluorescence and also by filling the pores by fibrillar structures as demonstrated by SEM. The controlled release of Dox occurs over 5 days to an extent of 37 ± 2%, 26 ± 0.5%, and 21 ± 1.5% in PBS at pH 5.5, 6.8, and 7.4 respectively. Since these hydrogels are m...