REVIEW Open Access Alginate-based hydrogels as drug delivery vehicles in cancer treatment and their applications in wound dressing and 3D bioprinting Farhad Abasalizadeh 1 , Sevil Vaghefi Moghaddam 2 , Effat Alizadeh 3 , Elahe akbari 4 , Elmira Kashani 5 , Seyyed Mohammad Bagher Fazljou 1 , Mohammadali Torbati 6* and Abolfazl Akbarzadeh 7,8* Abstract Hydrogels are a three-dimensional and crosslinked network of hydrophilic polymers. They can absorb a large amount of water or biological fluids, which leads to their swelling while maintaining their 3D structure without dissolving (Zhu and Marchant, Expert Rev Med Devices 8:607–626, 2011). Among the numerous polymers which have been utilized for the preparation of the hydrogels, polysaccharides have gained more attention in the area of pharmaceutics; Sodium alginate is a non-toxic, biocompatible, and biodegradable polysaccharide with several unique physicochemical properties for which has used as delivery vehicles for drugs (Kumar Giri et al., Curr Drug Deliv 9:539–555, 2012). Owing to their high-water content and resembling the natural soft tissue, hydrogels were studied a lot as a scaffold. The formation of hydrogels can occur by interactions of the anionic alginates with multivalent inorganic cations through a typical ionotropic gelation method. However, those applications require the control of some properties such as mechanical stiffness, swelling, degradation, cell attachment, and binding or release of bioactive molecules by using the chemical or physical modifications of the alginate hydrogel. In the current review, an overview of alginate hydrogels and their properties will be presented as well as the methods of producing alginate hydrogels. In the next section of the present review paper, the application of the alginate hydrogels will be defined as drug delivery vehicles for chemotherapeutic agents. The recent advances in the application of the alginate-based hydrogels will be describe later as a wound dressing and bioink in 3D bioprinting. Keywords: Alginate hydrogels, Drug delivery, Cancer, Wound dressing, 3D bioprinting Introduction Hydrogels Hydrogels are three-dimensional networks in which hydrophilic polymers crosslink together. They could swell by absorbing the large quantities of water or bio- logical fluids while keeping their network structure. These compounds were similar to the living tissue be- cause of their high-water capacity, penetrability, and consistency. Recently, a lot of research was done on the preparation of the transdermal membranes using poly- saccharides [1–3]. Among the most widely proposed hydrophilic polymers in hydrogels preparation, polysac- charides had a number of benefits versus the synthetic polymers. Hydrogels had prepared from polysaccharides attracted the attention of researches, due to the applica- tions in biomedical and other areas like those of phar- macy, chemical engineering, agriculture, and food. Despite the limitations of the natural polysaccharides in their reactivity and processability, they could also be used by cross-linking, blending and etc. after modifica- tion [4]. Sodium alginate (SA) was one of the most com- monly used natural polysaccharides which was obtained from the condensation of β-D-mannuronic acid (M) and 1–4 linked α-L-guluronic residues (G). SA had the © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. * Correspondence: torbatim@tbzmed.ac.ir; dr.akbarzadeh2010@gmail.com 6 Department of Food Science and Technology, Faculty of Nutrition, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran 7 Tuberculosis and Lung Disease Research Center of Tabriz, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz 5154853431, Iran Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Abasalizadeh et al. Journal of Biological Engineering (2020) 14:8 https://doi.org/10.1186/s13036-020-0227-7