Hyaluronic acid thiol modified injectable hydrogel: Synthesis, characterization, drug release, cellular drug uptake and anticancer activity

Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is an excellent solvent for various types of anticancer drugs. Here, beyond that, it can participate in a disulfide bond crosslink between sulfhydryl (-SH) modified hyaluronic acid (HA-SH) molecules to form the hydrogel. Thus, during the above crosslink process, the dissolved drug in DMSO could be effectively loaded inside the hydrogels' porous structures as an injectable peritumoral implant. The loaded drugs can be sustained released through hydrogel swelling and degradation around the tumor tissue to suppress tumor growth. In this paper, the above hydrogel was used as a peritumoral drug-loaded implant for chemotherapeutics, photosensitizer, and photothermal reagent, respectively, for chemotherapy, photodynamic therapy, and photothermal therapy in cancer treatment. Therefore, this DMSO involved HA-SS-HA (HA, hyaluronic acid; -SS-, disulfide bond) hydrogel fabrication method is simple and widely applicable for drug-loaded peritumoral implant preparation.