There are various fields of application for chitosan-based hydrogels. Hydrogels can be manufactured by chemical or physical cross-linking. The hydrophilic groups of chitosan enable the absorption of water. Chitosan hydrogels are suitable as scaffold materials for tissue engineering by mimicking the extracellular matrix. Additionally an application as drug delivery system for drugs, protein or growth factors is also possible.[1] In the following, we briefly present a number of publications about the development and application of chitosan hydrogels using chitosans by HMC.

In March 2017, 215 articles were released about chitosan and chitosan derivatives. The top three nations in chitosan research are China (59), India (32) and USA (27). Main focuses were nanoparticels, evaluation studies and pharmaceutical preparations.