Development of a Chitosan Nanofibrillar Scaffold for Skin Repair and Regeneration

Abstract

The final goal of the present study was the development of a 3-D chitosan dressing that would shorten the healing time of skin wounds by stimulating migration, invasion, and proliferation of the relevant cutaneous resident cells. Three-dimensional chitosan nanofibrillar scaffolds produced by electrospinning were compared with evaporated films and freeze-dried sponges for their biological properties. The nanofibrillar structure strongly improved cell adhesion and proliferation in vitro. When implanted in mice, the nanofibrillar scaffold was colonized by mesenchymal cells and blood vessels. Accumulation of collagen fibrils was also observed. In contrast, sponges induced a foreign body granuloma. When used as a dressing covering full-thickness skin wounds in mice, chitosan nanofibrils induced a faster regeneration of both the epidermis and dermis compartments. Altogether our data illustrate the critical importance of the nanofibrillar structure of chitosan devices for their full biocompatibility and demonstrate the significant beneficial effect of chitosan as a wound-healing biomaterial.

PLLA–collagen and PLLA–gelatin hybrid scaffolds with funnel-like porous structure for skin tissue engineering

“…The PLLA mesh gradually detached from the wound bed accompanied with infiltration of inflammatory cells and maturation of epidermis. Some researchers also reported the inflammatory responses and separation of implanted materials from regenerated skin, which is a common phenomenon in the wound healing [22][23][24][25][26].…”

Multifunctional Nanofibers towards Active Biomedical Therapeutics

“…No cytotoxicity was revealed associated with the scaffold which proved that the scaffold was biocompatible [131]. These studies were further supported by Tchemtchoua and coworkers [132]. They used chitosan sponges, films, and nanofibers to do regenerative studies using fibroblasts, keratinocytes and epithelial cells of mice.…”

Nanofibrous Structure of Chitosan for Biomedical Applications

“…Recently, a library of various polymer-solvent combinations which has a crucial role in transforming chitosan into nanofibers has been developed for many ground breaking applications in different disciplines of biomedical technology such as such as in tissue engineering, wound healing, drug delivery, and anti-bacterial applications [33,34,[40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47]. These studies as well as steady state growth of number of publications of chitosan based nanofibers in each year (Figure 3) demonstrate enormous potential of chitosan nanofibers in the biomedical field.…”