Crosslinked Marine Polysaccharides for Delivery of Therapeutics

Marine biomaterials can be grouped into three broad categories: polysaccharides, proteins, and lipids. Among these, polysaccharides from both plants and marine animals are of the greatest interest. This is explainable-despite the fact that the basic structural unit is the glycosidic cycle-by the presence of various functional groups, with high chemical reactivity even in moderate conditions, which allow relatively easy chemical modifications, through biological properties such as biocompatibility, biodegradability, and anti-inflammatory activity as well as adhesive and, in some cases, antimicrobial activity. This chapter aims to present the different possibilities of crosslinking the polysaccharides of marine origin, its organization being made on the basis of the type of crosslinking method. Although, over time, numerous polysaccharides have been isolated from marine plant and animal organisms, at least so far some of them have not found their use in obtaining hydrogels. Therefore, all types of hydrogel formulations as drug delivery systems, studied in literature in the last decade and based on polysaccharides, such as chitosan, chitin, k-carrageenan, hyaluronic acid, alginic acid/alginates, agar/agarose, and fucoidan, will be discussed in this chapter.