Nanostructured Conducting Polymer Biomaterials and Their Applications in Controlled Drug Delivery

Nanostructured Conducting Polymer Biomaterials and Their Applications in Controlled Drug Delivery 

Biomedical Applications of Electroactive Polymer Actuators Edited by Federico Carpi and Elisabeth Smela 2009 John Wiley Sons Ltd. ISBN 978-0-470-77305-5 

Nanostructured materials exhibit unique and novel properties, largely as a consequence of their small size [8, 9]. They have a wide range of applications in chemistry [10, 11], physics [12], biology [13], electronics [14, 15], mechanics [16, 17] and materials science [18,19], They are especially important for applications in biomedical sciences such as drug delivery [7, 20], neural engineering [21, 22], biosensors [23] and biotechnology and drug discovery [24], 

Conducting polymers are being considered for a number of organic electronic device apphcations such as light-emitting diodes [47, 48], thin film transistors [49-51], super-capacitors [52-56], photovoltaic cells [57-59], and chemical sensors [60-66]. Some of the most exciting and important applications are expected from biomedical devices, where they have been considered as actuators [7, 67-71] and sensors [4, 7, 67, 72-78]. 

Several studies have been done to explore strategies to reduce the initial impedance electrode sites or to limit early and late reactive responses or in order to minimize electrode-tissue interface impedance, including electrochemical deposition of conducting polymers on the surface of recording sites [3, 7, 101, 113] and systematic release of antiinflammatory drags to the site of implantation [109, 114]. 

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