FUNDING INFORMATION

PROJECT CODE: PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2021-0597. Contract number: 145/2022

ACRONYM: NOVAHY

DURATION: 2022 - 2024. STARTING DATE: 09.06.2022 

FUNDING PROGRAMME: Human Resources; Subprogram: Young Research Teams

CONTRACTING AUTHORITY: Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding

TOTAL BUDGET: 450000 lei

Polysaccharides, like cellulose, are by far the largest amount of all polymers produced in the world. Fully biodegradable, they are made by Nature. They are the sustainable polymeric materials of tomorrow, when synthetic polymers coming from oil will become expensive and rare. A much advanced knowledge (around structure, derivatization, and control of processing) of the polysaccharides in all their basic aspects will bring a lot of new possibilities to obtain new polymers, soft materials, cellular structures and composites from renewable materials. Oxidation of cellulose is one of the most important modification methods to prepare value-added cellulose derivatives for further applications. Mild oxidation of polysaccharides affords ketones, carbonyl and carboxyl groups, which readily condense to in situ forming hydrogels with amine-containing polymers. This type of imine-crosslinked hydrogel displays several interesting and practically valuable properties including injectability, self-healing, tunable moduli, and ability to respond to multiple types of stimulus, so that these are promising materials for biomedical applications. In this project, we propose to synthesis a serial of injectable hydrogels from oxidized polysaccharides and gelatin using two-step process. The addition of polysaccharides to gelatin is advantageous in mimicking the ECM, which largely contains proteoglycans or glycoproteins.