Polymer-based anti-adhesive barriers: A comprehensive overview of current approaches for medical and biological applications

Abstract

Tissue and cell adhesions are undesirable conditions observed after surgical operations. This adhesion is seen at a high rate in many patients after the surgical operation. It is especially observed in biological parts such as the abdominal cavity, thoracic cavity, and tendons. Due to the healing of the fibrous tissues in the wound after the surgery, this part causes adhesion in the surrounding tissues and organs, and patients may develop complications such as chronic pain, intestinal obstruction and functional obstruction of organs after adhesion, may require a repeat surgical operation, and is a serious problem that may cause infertility in women. Chronic pain, intestinal obstruction, and functional obstruction of organs may develop complications after adhesion. To prevent this situation, it is very important to develop barriers with higher biocompatibility, low cost, easily applicable, and synthesizable instead of existing anti-adhesive barriers. Potential candidates with these properties are thought to be polymers. Polymers offer many options for use as anti-adhesive barriers since they can be obtained from natural sources and synthetically. These options can be designed according to the characteristics of the anti-adhesive barriers desired to be synthesized. These polymers can be produced in a short time using very simple techniques in the forms of hydrogel, membrane, fiber, film, etc. In addition to these, these polymers synthesized as anti-adhesive membranes can act as simultaneous drug release and imaging agents in various combinations. In this article, medical and biological applications of anti-adhesive barriers with various formulations developed with different polymer types are mentioned. Therefore, through this article, we report on recent work and some key points in the development of such applications.