Peptide-based hydrogels for biomedical applications

Abstract Hydrogels happen to be one of the various recent advances made in the area of biomedical engineering. They are soft, jelly-like materials characterized by high water-retention capacity. At the molecular level, such hydrogels are usually characterized by a fibrous network that can trap water along with other water-soluble molecules. Such materials can find applications in sustained drug delivery, vaccine adjuvants, wound dressings, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine. Among a variety of molecules that can cause hydrogelation, peptides and peptide-based materials have gained particular attention. Peptides offer various advantages over other polymers, namely, biocompatibility, biodegradability, the ease of synthesis and purification, the ease of incorporating nonnatural amino acids, the ease of making peptide/nonpeptide hybrids, and the ease of tuning the properties by tweaking the amino acid sequence. This chapter discusses the recent advances in the area of short hydrogelating peptides as well as their potential biomedical applications.