Photothermal nanohybrid hydrogels for biomedical applications

In the past decades, diseases such as wound infection, cancer, bone defect and osteoarthritis have constantly threatened the public health. However, the traditional treatment has many insufficiencies, such as high cost, easy recurrence and high biological toxicity. Hydrogel is a material with three-dimensional network structure, which has a series of advantages, such as injectability, self-heal ability, easy loading and controllability of drug release, and excellent biocompatibility. Therefore, it is extensively used in drug delivery, antibacterial, anti-cancer and other fields. However, the traditional hydrogels have the single performance, and therapeutic efficacy is often rely on the drugs loaded on them to cure diseases, which cannot achieve sustainable therapeutic effect. In order to solve this problem, photothermal nano hydrogel with photothermal agent (PTA) has become an ideal material due to its excellent physical and chemical properties. Photothermal nano hydrogels used in photothermal therapy (PTT) can exploit the photothermal effect of photothermal agent to increase local temperature and control the sol-gel phase transition behavior of hydrogels, so they are widely used in drug release, photothermal sterilization, photothermal inhibition of cancer cells and enhancement of bone repair. To sum up, this paper introduces the preparation of hydrogels with photothermal nanomaterials, and discusses their applications in the fields of drug release, photothermal sterilization, photothermal cancer cell inhibition and enhanced bone repair.