Research Progress on Conducting Polymer-Based Biomedical Applications

Abstract

Conducting polymers (CPs) have attracted significant attention in a variety of research fields, particularly in biomedical engineering, because of the ease in controlling their morphology, their high chemical and environmental stability, and their biocompatibility, as well as their unique optical and electrical properties. In particular, the electrical properties of CPs can be simply tuned over the full range from insulator to metal via a doping process, such as chemical, electrochemical, charge injection, and photo-doping. Over the past few decades, remarkable progress has been made in biomedical research including biosensors, tissue engineering, artificial muscles, and drug delivery, as CPs have been utilized as a key component in these fields. In this article, we review CPs from the perspective of biomedical engineering. Specifically, representative biomedical applications of CPs are briefly summarized: biosensors, tissue engineering, artificial muscles, and drug delivery. The motivation for use of and the main function of CPs in these fields above are discussed. Finally, we highlight the technical and scientific challenges regarding electrical conductivity, biodegradability, hydrophilicity, and the loading capacity of biomolecules that are faced by CPs for future work. This is followed by several strategies to overcome these drawbacks.

Electrochemical Biosensors Based on Conducting Polymers: A Review

“…Conducting polymers have been widely used in the area of bioanalytical and biomedical science [52,53], drug delivery [54][55][56], tissue engineering [57][58][59], and cell culture [60][61][62] due to their intrinsic properties and biocompatibility [63][64][65][66]. In addition, conducting polymers represent an attractive sensitive material for biosensors due to their electrical properties that allow to convert biochemical information into electrical signals.…”

Biodegradable conducting polymeric materials for biomedical applications: a review

“…Conducting polymers are well known for outstanding electrical and optical properties such as inorganic semiconductors and metals (Pal et al, 2020). Also, they possess properties of common polymers such as their easy preparation, functionalization and processability (Anantha-Iyengar et al, 2019;Park et al, 2019).…”

“…Conducting polymers are well known for outstanding electrical and optical properties such as inorganic semiconductors and metals (Pal et al, 2020). Also, they possess properties of common polymers such as their easy preparation, functionalization and processability (Anantha‐Iyengar et al, 2019; Jadoun & Riaz, ; Park et al, 2019). Some common conducting polymers are classified as polyacetylene (PAc) (Wang, Sun, et al, 2019), polypyrrole (PPY) (Jadoun et al, 2018), polyaniline (PANI) (Jangid et al, 2020), poly(o‐phenylenediamine) (POPD) (Riaz et al, 2017)), polythiophene (PTH) (Jadoun & Riaz, 2019), polyfuran (PF) (Ozkazanc & Ozkazanc, 2020), polycarbazole (PCz) (Jadoun et al, 2017), poly(3,4‐ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) (Chen et al, 2020), polynaphthylamine (PNA) (Jadoun et al, 2017 b; Jadoun et al, 2017c) and polyanisidine (PANIS) (Jadoun et al, 2018), (Figure 2).…”

Conducting polymers in wearable devices

“…Rapid growth of CPs in biomedical engineering areas includes neural networks (Braendlein et al, 2017; Nielsen et al, 2016; Rivnay et al, 2015), artificial muscles(Khan et al, 2019) and tissue engineering (Talikowska et al, 2019). CPs offer synergistic properties of both polymers and inorganic semiconductors, being lightweight, relatively easy to process and mechanically flexible combined with electrically conductive(Chapman et al, 2020; Park et al, 2019; Puiggali‐Jou et al, 2019; Talikowska et al, 2019). These properties are highly sought after for wearable electronic systems which leads to increasing trend of adopting organic electroactive materials for wearables utilizing conducting polymers (CPs) (Nezakati et al, 2018).…”

“…These properties are highly sought after for wearable electronic systems which leads to increasing trend of adopting organic electroactive materials for wearables utilizing conducting polymers (CPs) (Nezakati et al, 2018). This is supported by advanced biocompatibility of the polymer (Arteshi et al, 2018), chemical stability, high processability, low production cost (Park et al, 2019) and being electrically tunable (Boehler et al, 2019). Controllable conductivity and polymer volumes by external triggers such as electrical signal, motion, pH, temperature and mechanical force are harnessed in wearable sensing devices.…”