As hyaluronic acid hydrogels are exteremly hydrophile, is there any possible method to modify them to have hydrophobe hyaluronic acid?
Well, the acid functionality is always a strong pusher towards hydrophilicity, so you would have to temporarily block that which probably would make it lose its useful functions.
If you want to modify the hydrogel at large, silicon structures can be utilized such as in contact lenses.
An outer coating of silicon rich lattices can create a hydrophobe corpus in which for example hydrophile hyaloronic acid is reserved.
However if the acid has a specific application that requires contact with tissue, this coating will also wall off the acid from the recipient surface.
The acid functionality is resposible for the hydrophilicity of hyaluronic acid, as Jürgen Weipert already mentioned.
A simple method to reduce the hydrophilicity is the introduction of some hydrophobic group as an ester group. This can be compared to the case of polymethacrylic acid, which has a carboxylic acid group and is water soluble, and polymethylmethacrylate, which carries a methylgroup in its ester group and is not water soluble any more.
The larger a alkyl group attched to the carboxylic group, the lower is the hydrophilicity of the material.
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