Stimuli-reponsive polymers and their bioconjugates

Stimuli responsive polymers can provide a variety of applications for the biomedical fields. The interest in these polymers has exponentially increased due to their promising potential. Among them, temperature and pH responsive mechanisms have been considerably investigated because they are relatively convenient and effective stimuli in many applications. In this review, our main purposes are focused on temperature and pH responsive polymer systems and additionally the other stimuli-based responsive polymers will be assessed. Dozens of reviews have been recently reported to introduce the field of stimuli responsive polymers. However, most of these reviews have been focused on one specific application such as drug delivery or one specific physical form such as hydrogels. In our point of view, the whole range of applications and physical forms of stimuli responsive polymers will be elucidated, which is more helpful to design new approaches because the basic concepts and mechanisms are systematically connected. This means that any new advanced concepts and mechanisms can be utilized in a variety of other applications as well as other physical forms. Also, we will describe the classification of stimuli responsive polymers by their mechanism of response to stimuli. Moreover, this review focuses on recent approaches of molecular designs which are extremely necessary to develop more desirable and functional stimuli responsive polymers. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.