Hydrogel-based commercial products for biomedical applications: A review.

Hydrogels are hydrophilic polymer networks, able to absorb large amount of water, increasing their volume and showing a plethora of different material behaviors. Since their first practical application, dating from sixties of last century, they have been employed in several fields of biomedical sciences. After more than half a century of industrial uses, nowadays a lot of hydrogels are currently on the market for different purposes, and offering a wide spectra of features. In this review, even if it is virtually impossible to list all the commercial products based on hydrogels for biomedical applications, an extensive analysis of those materials that have reached the market has been carried out. The hydrogel-based materials used for drug delivery, wound dressing, tissue engineering, the building of contact lens, and hygiene products are enlisted and briefly described. A detailed snapshot of the set of these products that have reached the commercial maturity has been then obtained and presented. For each class of application, the basics of requirements are described, and then the materials are listed and classified on the basis of their chemical nature. For each product the commercial name, the producer, the chemical nature and the main characteristics are reported.