This Review Recent Advances in Chitosan and Alginate‐Based Hydrogels for Wound Healing Application

Abstract

Wound healing is a complicated yet necessary event that takes place in both animals and human beings for the body to repair itself due to injury. Wound healing involves various stages that ensure the restoration of the injured tissue at the end of the process. Wound dressing material acts as a protective extracellular barrier against potential damage to the injury and microbial invasion. Naturally, polysaccharides (chitosan and alginate) have inherent properties that have made them attractive for their usage in wound healing therapy. Alginate and chitosan have been used to develop novel wound healing and smart biomaterials due to various functionalities such as reducing swelling, non-toxic nature, biocompatibility, antimicrobial potential, and maintenance moist environment, ability to absorb wound fluid, and skin regeneration promotion. Functionalization of polysaccharides is one of the many approaches that have been used to modify and enhance the wound healing properties of these biomaterials. Many studies have been done to modify the polysaccharide hydrogels. Some of these are highlighted in this paper. The designing and development of smart hydrogels that react to their environment have recently sparked a significant scientific and pharmaceutical interest. Smart hydrogel development has been the primary focal area for developing highly advanced and sophisticated wound healing therapeutic technologies. This paper seeks to comprehensively shed light on the advancements of functionalized chitosan and alginate-based hydrogels and their applicability in wound healing therapeutics. In addition to this, thus identifying critical drawbacks faced in existing hydrogel systems and how prospective technologies enable digitally controlled bio-platforms coupled with biomaterials to improve wound care. This review hopes to stimulate and encourage researchers to identify future avenues worth investigation.

Current Trends in Advanced Alginate-Based Wound Dressings for Chronic Wounds

“…Na ALG/PEO ratio 1:1 Nanofiber characterization, cell interaction, adhesion and proliferation, binding and releasing heparin tests [28,96] 4 wt % Na ALG-5 wt % PEO-0. [11,89,98,100] 0.5-0.75% w/v Chitosan-0.5-1% w/v ALG-Dexamethasone/BSA/PDGF-bb/Avidin fibers Drug incorporation and release, PDGF-bb bioactivity [49,90] 0, 0.014, 0.041% w/v Chitosan-0.001% w/v Na ALG-Ninhydrin-CaCl 2 in fibers Filament characterization [49,101] 1.5 w % Na ALG-Ag-NPs in crosslinked fibers Wound healing effect on SKH-1 mice [102] An uniform morphology of the nanofibers can also be obtained by adding lecithin as a natural surfactant [93], or arginine-glycine-aspartic acid (RGD) [103].…”

Types and doses of anti‐adhesive agents injected into subacromial space do not have an effect on the clinical and anatomical outcomes after arthroscopic rotator cuff repair

“…Sodium alginate prevents tissue adhesion by preventing fibrosis at the surgical site during the early phase of wound healing [23]. This feature may explain the usage of sodium alginate in shoulder and abdominal surgeries [31, 39, 49].…”

“…This feature may explain the usage of sodium alginate in shoulder and abdominal surgeries [31, 39, 49]. Sodium alginate is a natural polysaccharide that prevents adhesion by forming a physical barrier on the surface of the wound tissue [23]. In contrast, poloxamer is a biocompatible copolymer with anti‐adhesive properties [5].…”

Green–Light–Driven Poly(N-isopropylacrylamide-acrylamide)/Fe3O4 Nanocomposite Hydrogel Actuators

“…Hydrogels are three-dimensional water-swollen polymeric networks, similar to soft tissues, which exhibit dramatic volume changes in response to various environmental stimuli (Li G. et al, 2020;Jiao et al, 2020;Gao et al, 2020). Due to such stimuli responsiveness, they reveal remarkable potential for wide applications, such as smart sensors (Han S et al, 2020;Chayapol et al, 2021) and actuators (Shang et al, 2019;Zhou et al, 2020;Li M. et al, 2020;Zhao et al, 2021), tissue engineering scaffolds (Mantha et al, 2019;Alfredo et al, 2021), biological separation platforms (Nawaz et al, 2019;Kibungu et al, 2021), controlled drug delivery (Han Z et al, 2020;Sun et al, 2020;Fang et al, 2021), and artificial muscles (Pattavarakorn et al, 2013;Shi et al, 2015). Considerable efforts have been made in the development of high-performance, multifunctional hydrogel actuators with regard to material selection, structural design, and actuation mechanisms owing to its applicability in human body implantable devices (Yang et al, 2019).…”