Background: The new concepts of personalized and precision medicine require the design
of more and more refined delivery systems. In this frame, hydrogels can play a very important role
as they represent the best surrogate of soft living tissues for what concerns rheological properties.
Thus, this paper focusses on a global theoretical approach able to describe how hydrogel polymeric
networks can aect the release kinetics of drugs characterized by dierent sizes. The attention
is focused on a case study dealing with an interpenetrated hydrogel made up by alginate and
poly(N-vinyl-2-pyrrolidone). Methods: Information about polymeric network characteristics (mesh
size distribution and polymer volume fraction) is deduced from the theoretical interpretation of the
rheological and the low field Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) characterization of hydrogels.
This information is then, embodied in the mass balance equation whose resolution provides the
release kinetics. Results: Our simulations indicate the influence of network characteristics on release
kinetics. In addition, the reliability of the proposed approach is supported by the comparison of the
model outcome with experimental release data. Conclusions: This study underlines the necessity of a
global theoretical approach in order to design reliable delivery systems based on hydrogels.
