Application in the Field of Biomedical Materials

Soy protein-based green composites are not only applied as an environmental friendly material in the fields of adhesives (Kumar et al. 2002), plastics (Kumar et al. 2011), and textile fibers (Kobayashi et al. 2014), but also as biodegradable membranes (Mamthi et al. 2014). Furthermore, the nutritional and health benefits of soy protein draw attention to the application in the field of biomedical materials (Silva et al. 2014), such as tissue engineering scaffolds (Chien and Shah 2012),... 

In recent years, a rapid progress has been made in the field of biomedical materials, which combine natural and synthetic polymers and can be used in a variety of applications, including wound closure [43, 44], drug delivery systems [45, 46], novel vascular grafts [47-50] or scaffolds [51, 52] for in vitro or in vivo tissue engineering [50, 53, 54]. 

Surface Coatings Applications of Hydrogels. The surface treatment of polymeric materials is one of the most active research areas in the field of biomedical materials. It is generally agreed that the surface of any material is what dictates its cellular response in the body. Attempts to design biocompatible... 

To the best of our knowledge, this symposium was the first to be organized in Italy entirely devoted to the several aspects of the use of synthetic and semisynthetic macromolecular materials in the field of biomedical and pharmacological applications. The intention of the Organizing Committee of the symposium was the promotion of a scientific and cultural initiative to gain the attention of various experts in line research of the potential of suitably designed "man-made" polymeric materials in biomedical applications. 

Starting from these considerations, the present chapter summarizes several types of cellulose nanocomposite (including the cellulose acetate-based ones), classified according to nanoreinforcement namre and surface modification processes. These recent scientific information can add to the basic knowledge in the field of polymeric materials, and to the diversification of their applications, especially in the biomedical domain, as due to their antimicrobial properties. 

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