Biowastes as a source of extracting chitin and chitosan for biomedical applications

Abstract

Biomaterials are designed to interact with biological systems in aid to wound healing, regeneration of tissue, mechanical support, and drug delivery to eventually improve current therapeutic outcomes. The adoption of biomaterials is increasing constantly in health care practices by making it more biocompatible and non-toxic under physiological conditions. These adoptions have been associated with improvements in therapeutic outcomes across the population, however, the dosage of therapeutics needed to successfully treat a disease is generally different for each individual and relies a lot on experiences of consultant doctors. Many times, it leads to human errors in deciding on drug doses, un-fit implants and explants and eventually adverse effects or less positive effects. The personalized medicine and devices bring forth the idea that the medicine should be tailored for a patient based on various characteristics, such as gender, age, genetic makeup, and lifestyle. These personalized medicine approaches include type of drugs, activation methods, nanoassemblies, biomedical devices, etc. Among these approaches, personalized biomedical devices have become popular with the advent of 3D printing technologies, which can make customized implants for each patient with minimum price, limited time, and high accuracy. Personalized biomedicine also involves designing of drug to cater the need of an individual with minimum side effects. In this review an effort has been made to introduce different aspects of customized biomedical agents like therapeutic biomolecules, nanomedicine, implants, and explants. This comprehensive review of literature indicates that use of 3D printing technology in producing drug releasing, biodegradable personalized implants could be better therapeutic solution for a range of medical conditions.

Keywords

• biowaste
• chitin
• chitosan
• wound healing
• drug delivery
• tissue engineering