Ph‐responsive succinoglycan‐carboxymethyl cellulose hydrogels with highly improved mechanical strength for controlled drug delivery systems

Abstract

Carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC)‐based hydrogels are generally superabsorbent and biocompatible, but their low mechanical strength limits their application. To overcome these drawbacks, we used bacterial succinoglycan (SG), a biocompatible natural polysaccharide, as a double crosslinking strategy to produce novel interpenetrating polymer network (IPN) hydrogels in a non‐bead form. These new SG/CMC‐based IPN hydrogels significantly increased the mechanical strength while maintaining the characteristic superabsorbent property of CMC‐based hydrogels. The SG/CMC gels exhibited an 8.5‐fold improvement in compressive stress and up to a 6.5‐fold higher storage modulus (G′) at the same strain compared to the CMC alone gels. Furthermore, SG/CMC gels not only showed pH‐controlled drug release for 5‐fluorouracil but also did not show any cytotoxicity to HEK‐293 cells. This suggests that SG/CMC hydrogels could be used as future biomedical biomaterials for drug delivery.