Heparin is a negatively charged polysaccharide with various chain lengths and a hydrophilic backbone. Due to its fascinating chemical and physical properties, nontoxicity, biocompatibility, and biodegradability, heparin has been extensively used in different fields of medicine, such as cardiovascular and hematology. This review highlights recent and future advancements in designing materials based on heparin for various biomedical applications. The physicochemical and mechanical properties, biocompatibility, toxicity, and biodegradability of heparin are discussed. In addition, the applications of heparin-based materials in various biomedical fields, such as drug/gene delivery, tissue engineering, cancer therapy, and biosensors, are reviewed. Finally, challenges, opportunities, and future perspectives in preparing heparin-based materials are summarized.

Blood is a vital reservoir housing numerous disease-related metabolites and cellular components. Thus, it is also of interest for cancer diagnosis. Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is widely used for molecular detection due to its very high sensitivity and multiplexing properties. Its real potential for cancer diagnosis is not yet clear. In this study, using silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) as substrates, a number of experimental parameters and scenarios were tested to disclose the potential for this technique for cancer diagnosis. The discrimination of serum samples from cancer patients, healthy individuals and patients with chronic diseases was successfully demonstrated with over 90% diagnostic accuracies. Moreover, the SERS spectra of the blood serum samples obtained from cancer patients before and after tumor removal were compared. It was found that the spectral pattern for serum from cancer patients evolved into the spectral pattern observed with serum from healthy individuals after the removal of tumors. The data strongly suggests that the technique has a tremendous potential for cancer detection and screening bringing the possibility of early detection onto the table.

Management of nanomaterials and nanosafety data needs to operate under the FAIR (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability) principles and this requires a unique, global identifier for each nanomaterial. Existing identifiers may not always be applicable or sufficient to definitively identify the specific nanomaterial used in a particular study, resulting in the use of textual descriptions in research project communications and reporting. To ensure that internal project documentation can later be linked to publicly released data and knowledge for the specific nanomaterials, or even to specific batches and variants of nanomaterials utilised in that project, a new identifier is proposed: the European Registry of Materials Identifier. We here describe the background to this new identifier, including FAIR interoperability as defined by FAIRSharing, identifiers.org, Bioregistry, and the CHEMINF ontology, and show how it complements other identifiers such as CAS numbers and the ongoing efforts to extend the InChI identifier to cover nanomaterials. We provide examples of its use in various H2020-funded nanosafety projects. Graphical Abstract