Polymeric Nanostructured Materials and Their Biomedical Applications

Since past two decades, nanomaterials have been widely used to meet the increasing demands of medical products especially based on tissue culturing and biomaterials. In particular, polymer modified and functionalized nanostructures owing to their considerable biodegradability and biocompatibility have fascinated remarkable attention. Besides their electrical and optical properties, their unlimited potential in targeting drug delivery makes them unique where there are no accessible ways. Polymer-based nanomaterialsPolymer-based nanomaterials are greatly preferred because of their low cost, ease of usage, versatility and their modification capability according to the size, weight and morphology. Subsequently, their usage led to obtain vaccines for oral administration and reduce the systemic adverse effects by assuring therapeutic drug dose at the target tissue. Among the most challenging tasks, gene therapy is the promising one. Therefore, remarkable studies both clinical and non-clinical have to be practiced in order to design potential commercial applications. This chapter contains discussion about different types of polymeric nanomaterials and their fabrication methods such as emulsification, emulsion polymerization, self-templatingSelf-templating, electrospinning, cross-linking method, ionic gelation and self-assemblySelf-assembly. For the elucidation of their structural and morphological characteristicsMorphological characteristics, different techniques including scanning electron microscopy (SEM)Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM)Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), photoluminescence (PL), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS)X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), X-ray diffraction (XRD)X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR)Fourier transformation infrared (FTIR) are being discussed. Application potential of polymer-based nanomaterialsPolymer-based nanomaterials is also discussed including tissue engineering, drug delivery, bioimaging, gene therapy, biosensing, cardiovascular, ocularOcular applications, drug resistance and orthopedic applicationsOrthopedic applications.