Borrowing From Nature: Biopolymers and Biocomposites as Smart Wound Care Materials

Abstract

Wound repair is a complex and tightly regulated physiological process, involving the activation of various cell types throughout each subsequent step (homeostasis, inflammation, proliferation, and tissue remodeling). Any impairment within the correct sequence of the healing events could lead to chronic wounds, with potential effects on the patience quality of life, and consequent fallouts on the wound care management. Nature itself can be of inspiration for the development of fully biodegradable materials, presenting enhanced bioactive potentialities, and sustainability. Naturally-derived biopolymers are nowadays considered smart materials. They provide a versatile and tunable platform to design the appropriate extracellular matrix able to support tissue regeneration, while contrasting the onset of adverse events. In the past decades, fabrication of bioactive materials based on natural polymers, either of protein derivation or polysaccharide-based, has been extensively exploited to tackle wound-healing related problematics. However, in today's World the exclusive use of such materials is becoming an urgent challenge, to meet the demand of environmentally sustainable technologies to support our future needs, including applications in the fields of healthcare and wound management. In the following, we will briefly introduce the main physico-chemical and biological properties of some protein-based biopolymers and some naturally-derived polysaccharides. Moreover, we will present some of the recent technological processing and green fabrication approaches of novel composite materials based on these biopolymers, with particular attention on their applications in the skin tissue repair field. Lastly, we will highlight promising future perspectives for the development of a new generation of environmentally-friendly, naturally-derived, smart wound dressings.

Keywords: alginate; antibacterial; biomimetic; chitosan; hyaluronic acid; keratin; silk fibroin; wound healing.

Figure 1

The circularity concept of Nature-mimicking for an environmentally-friendly wound healthcare. Self-growing biomaterials panel is adapted from Haneef et al. (2017). This material is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode).

Figure 2

Naturally-derived biopolymer-based structures with potential application as wound healing systems. (a) examples of protein-based biopolymers primary structures—aminoacidic sequence of collagen type I molecules and aminoacidic sequence of silk fibroin molecules: Gly, glycine; Ala, alanine; Pro, proline; Ser, serine; Hyp, hydroxyproline; (b) natural polysaccharide structures—hyaluronic acid, chitosan, and alginate; (c,d) Biocompatible silk/parsley electrospun fibers (average diameter 50 nm) able to grow NIH3T3 fibroblast cells adapted with permission from Guzman-Puyol et al. (2016) Copyright^©2016 American Chemical Society; (e,f) wool keratin sponges, reprinted from Patrucco et al. (2016) Copyright^©2016 with permission from Elsevier; (g) calcium cross-linked alginate beads and (h) film incorporating antiseptic PVPI complex, reprinted from Liakos et al. (2013) Copyright^©2013 with permission from Elsevier; (i,l) mycelia material from P. ostreatus after 20 days of growth on potato-dextrose broth and cellulose, presenting a 3D network of hyphae. Panels (i,l) are adapted from Haneef et al. (2017). This material is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode).