Designer Bio-inspired Hydrogels : A Key to Biomedical Challenges

Low molecular weight hydrogelators (LMOHGs) are extremely promising synthons, in the bottom-up fabrication of supramolecular soft materials. In recent years, significant contributions to Peptide-based hydrogels coined as Bioinspired fragments have been made. In this book chapter, our effort lies to module two different aspects: Firstly the underlying guidelines and principles for the tailoring of scaffolds that would lead to hydrogel formation and an overview of the role of non-covalent interactions/chemical functionalization that are the key components of various selfassembly processes. In the second section, we aim to bring together our recent achievements with designer assembly with respect to their self-aggregation behavior and applications mainly in the biomedical arena like drug delivery carrier design, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory as well as wound healing properties. We anticipate that this article would provide a conceptual demonstration of the different approaches taken toward the construction of these task-specific designer hydrogels.

Keywords: Anti-inflammatory, Antimicrobial activity, Biocompatibility, Drug delivery carrier, Mechanical strength, Proteolytic stability, Wound healing.