Amino Acid‐Derived Smart and Functional Polymers for Biomedical Applications: Current Status and Future Perspectives

Abstract

Amino acid‐derived smart and functional polymers have emerged as a promising class of biomaterials for diverse biomedical applications. In recent years, a wide range of such polymers with different compositions, macromolecular architectures, and chain‐end functionalities are prepared. Such polymers exhibit responsiveness to different external stimuli like chemical, physical, or biochemical stimuli. These stimuli include temperature, pH, metal ions, light, glucose, redox, or a combination of these factors. Thus developed smart and functional amino acid‐derived polymers are employed in different biomedical and biotechnological applications including but not limited to tissue engineering, drug delivery, wound healing, gene delivery, and biosensors. Herein, current state‐of‐the‐art and future perspectives of such amino acid‐derived smart and functional polymers are described, which may be useful for researchers working toward the development of new amino acid‐derived polymeric materials for the construction of the next generation of smart materials.