{"doi":"10.1002/adhm.202200412","title":"A Tribute to Professor Nicholas Peppas","abstract":"It is our greatest pleasure to organize this special issue of Advanced Healthcare Materials (AHM) in honor of our mentor, colleague, and friend Nicholas Peppas, professor and director of the Institute for Biomaterials, Drug Delivery and Regenerative Medicine at the University of Texas, Austin. Since its debut in 2010, AHM has published more than 2500 manuscripts from over 60 countries in many research areas, including biomaterials, biointerfaces, biofabrication, tissue engineering, nanomedicine, regenerative medicine, and diagnostic devices. Over the past several decades, Peppas has made pioneering and sustained contributions to most of these areas. Peppas is a pioneer in the synthesis, characterization, and modeling of the dynamic behavior of polymer networks, especially water-swollen hydrogels. His influential work includes the use of hydrogels and their biomaterial applications in bionanotechnology, molecular recognition processes, biosensing, and drug delivery. With respect to the latter, Peppas has developed many of the leading theories and equations that matured the field of controlled release and led to new developments, including seminal contributions to the development of feedback-controlled biomedical devices. His work is characterized by an elegant blending of modern molecular and cellular biology with biomolecular engineering to generate next-generation biomaterials and devices with enhanced function, longevity, reliability, and performance. This special issue contains 20 timely contributions from researchers around the world. Some of the corresponding authors received Ph.D. degrees or postdoctoral training under the tutelage of Peppas, but it is a fair statement that all the authors should have been inspired by and/or benefited from the pioneering work of Peppas in biomaterials. The contributed manuscripts can be broadly divided into four categories: drug delivery, tissue engineering, biofabrication, and advanced therapeutics. In the context of drug delivery, Mark E. Byrne and co-workers report a successful demonstration of sustained, week-long release of a small molecule therapeutic from extended-wear silicone hydrogel contact lenses in a rabbit model (2101263). The authors could keep all commercial properties of the lens while achieving controlled release of the drug at therapeutically relevant concentrations for the duration of wear. This work highlights the enormous potential of contact lenses as a viable delivery platform for the post-cataract, uveitis, post-LASIK, and corneal abrasion treatment. Chien-Chi Lin and co-workers report an injectable, acylhydrazone-linked polymer hydrogel for sustained protein release and cell encapsulation (2101284). As the acylhydrazone bond is pH sensitive, the hydrogel could be hydrolytically degraded in a mild acidic environment and the degradation rate could be controlled by tuning the ketone/hydrazide ratio. Significantly, the injectable hydrogel is cytocompatible and can be formulated for the encapsulation of cells and pH-responsive release of proteins. Mark W. Tibbitt, Ratchaneewan Aunpad, and co-workers report the development of a network of biopolymer nanoparticles for the protection and local delivery of antimicrobial peptides (2101426). Specifically, an antimicrobial peptide, PA13, was electrostatically trapped in a network of positively- and negatively-charged nanoparticles made of chitosan and dextran sulfate, respectively. The moldable and biodegradable network of nanoparticles could protect the bioactive peptide from enzymatic degradation while having it released locally. Upon exposure to proteolytic enzymes, the network loaded with PA-13 could be used to eliminate Pseudomonas aeruginosa during in vitro culture and in an ex vivo porcine skin model, holding promises for would healing and related applications. Kinam Park and co-workers investigated the initial formation of a skin layer on poly(lactide-co-glycolide) (PLGA) microparticles, which are extensively used i","journal":"Advanced Healthcare Materials","year":2022,"id":267932,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":6,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.948,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":14856,"name":"Younan Xia","orcid":"0000-0003-2431-7048","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":238183,"name":"Kristi S. 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