Issue 42, 2018

Fibrous polymer nanomaterials for biomedical applications and their transport by fluids: an overview

Abstract

Over the past few decades, there has been strong interest in the development of new micro- and nanomaterials for biomedical applications. Their use in the form of capsules, particles or filaments suspended in body fluids is associated with conformational changes and hydrodynamic interactions responsible for their transport. The dynamics of fibres or other long objects in Poiseuille flow is one of the fundamental problems in a variety of biomedical contexts, such as mobility of proteins, dynamics of DNA or other biological polymers, cell movement, tissue engineering, and drug delivery. In this review, we discuss several important applications of micro and nanoobjects in this field and try to understand the problems of their transport in flow resulting from material-environment interactions in typical, crowded, and complex biological fluids. Our aim is to elucidate the relationship between the nano- and microscopic structures of elongated polymer particles and their flow properties, thus opening the possibility to design nanoobjects that can be efficiently transported by body fluids for targeted drug release or local tissue regeneration.

Graphical abstract: Fibrous polymer nanomaterials for biomedical applications and their transport by fluids: an overview

Article information

Article type
Review Article
Submitted
21 Jun 2018
Accepted
10 Oct 2018
First published
11 Oct 2018

Soft Matter, 2018,14, 8421-8444

Fibrous polymer nanomaterials for biomedical applications and their transport by fluids: an overview

S. Pawłowska, T. A. Kowalewski and F. Pierini, Soft Matter, 2018, 14, 8421 DOI: 10.1039/C8SM01269E

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