Carbohydrate polymer hydrogels: an environmental and eco-friendly choice for biomedical applications?

Life expectancy has been improving over the years. Nevertheless, changes in lifestyle e.g., overworking and consumption of processed food, have led to overweight and related health problems. In addition, despite many circumstances explaining these points, many points are not fully understood, and the consequences for the human body are evident. Considering that, many innovative materials based on carbohydrate hydrogels were performed in literature for diverse of health problems, as these biomaterials have great potential for the biomedical area. This review exposes the research on carbohydrate hydrogels for biomedical applications. This unique type of hydrogels presents various properties and characteristics, enabling their use in tissue regeneration/repair, wound dressing/healing, antibacterial activity, biosensors, theragnostic, drug delivery, and protein delivery. The proposal of this overview is to discuss the different characteristics, properties and physicochemical character of carbohydrate hydrogels, and their subsequent modulation of their behaviour on biological media. Although, there have been various publications in the last years on this topic, there is a significant gap in biomedical areas, such as theragnostic, biosensors, and antibacterial activity.