Preparation and Characterization of Blend Thermogel System for Biomedical Applications

Thermogelling biomaterials have been extensively unitilized for diverse biomedical applications including injectable drug delivery. However, their practical uses for various applications have been limited due to their intrinsically week physical and mechanical properties and difficulty in tailor-making their properties for specific applications. To over-come these limitations with the use of typical thermogels, in this study, a series of blend thermogels have been prepared by physical mixing of poly(ethylene oxide)-poly(propylene oxide)-poly(ethylene oxide)(PEO-PPO-PEO) triblock copo-lymer as a representative synthetic thermogel, and hexanoyl glycol chitosan (HGC) as a natural polymer-based thermogel. Various blend thermogels with different compositions have been characterized and compared in terms of thermogelation, physicochemical properties, degradability, cytotoxicity and drug solubilization and release properties. Our blend ther-mogel system can demonstrate tunable thermogelling and physico-chemical properties, depending on the blend compo-sition, extending their potential biomedical applications with customized properties.