Recent advances of hyaluronic acid-based materials in drug delivery systems and regenerative medicine: A review

Abstract

Nowadays, diseases have a high rate of incidence and mortality worldwide. On the other side, the drawbacks of conventional modalities in the suppression of diseases have encountered serious problematic issues for the health of human beings. For instance, although various approaches have been applied for the treatment of cancer, it has an ever-increasing rate of incidence and mortality throughout the globe. Thus, there is a fundamental requirement for the development of breakthrough technologies in the inhibition of diseases. Hyaluronic acid (HA) is one of the most practical biopolymers in the suppression of diseases. HA has lots of potential physicochemical (like rheological, structural, molecular weight, and ionization, etc.) and biomedical properties (bioavailability, biocompatibility, CD44 targeting and signaling pathways, components of biological organs, mucoadhesion, immunomodulation, etc.), which made it a potential candidate for the development of breakthrough tools in pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences. The ease of surface modification (carboxylation, amidation, hydroxylation, and esterification), high bioavailability and synthesis routes, and various administration routes are considered as other merits of HA-based vehicles. These mucopolysaccharide HA-based materials have been considerably developed for use in drug delivery systems (DDSs), cancer therapy, wound healing, antiaging, and tissue engineering. This review summarizes the advantages of HA-based DDS and scaffolds in the treatment of diseases.