A Novel Antifungal Plasma-Activated Hydrogel

Abstract

Antifungal hydrogels with added antifungal drugs have received extensive attention from researchers due to their potential use in various applications, such as wound dressings and ultrasound gel pads. In this study, we proposed and designed an alternative antifungal hydrogel preparation strategy to obtain hydrogels with high antifungal abilities. We employed plasma-activated water (PAW) instead of water in the hydrogel polymerization process to prepare plasma-activated hydrogels (PAHs). Disc diffusion assay results revealed that PAH exhibits satisfactory antifungal activity. Interestingly, the oxidation–reduction potential (ORP) of the PAH was significantly lower than that of conventional polyacrylamide (PAAm) hydrogels, and we provided a possible reaction equation to explain the lower value of ORP in the PAH. Furthermore, using electron spin resonance (ESR) spectroscopy, the hydroxyl radical was detected in PAHs. Although the active ingredients in the hydrogel cannot be quantitatively measured, the hydroxyl radical and NO3 – are speculated to be the main components of PAH with antifungal activity according to ESR spectroscopy and optical emission spectroscopy. Further experiments also showed that PAH has a longer antifungal lifetime than PAW. In summary, the proposed plasma-activated hydrogels can provide valuable preparation strategies for delivering antifungal capabilities and have many potential applications in biomedical fields.

New Approach to Antifungal Activity of Fluconazole Incorporated into the Porous 6-Anhydro-α-l-Galacto-β-d-Galactan Structures Modified with Nanohydroxyapatite for Chronic-Wound Treatments—In Vitro Evaluation

“…Moreover, generally such materials are biocompatible, noncytotoxic and nonimmunogenic [16]. Since the wet environment inside the wound promotes microbial growth, the application of such wound dressing would not only enhance wound healing and skin regeneration, but also block microbial adhesion to the wound and prevent host tissue invasion [18]. Thus, the main goal of this research is to estimate antifungal activity of prepared hydroxyapatite hydrogels loaded with fluconazole against Candida sp.…”

Hydrogels as Potential Nano-, Micro- and Macro-Scale Systems for Controlled Drug Delivery

“…Therefore, drug immobilization in a polymer matrix should be considered in the context of controlled release at target sites. Various in vivo and in vitro drug application techniques have been developed with various therapeutic properties [12,[22][23][24], including antifungal [25][26][27], antibacterial [28][29][30][31][32], antitumor [33][34][35][36], anti-inflammatory [37,38], immunomodulatory [39][40][41], anti-glycemic [42], antioxidant [32,37,43], tissue repair and regeneration [14,16,44].…”

Study of the anticancer effects of a helium plasma jet combined with four anticancer drugs on 3D bladder tumour spheroids

“…The results may be due to the reaction between some reducing agents in the cell culture medium and the ROS/RNS generated by the plasma jet, resulting in the reduction of the ORP value. [ 29 ] The reasons for this phenomenon will be studied in our future work. However, it is noteworthy that the ORP of the plasma‐activated cell culture medium hardly changed after the addition of the four drugs.…”