Rotary Jet Spinning (RJS): A Key Process to Produce Biopolymeric Wound Dressings

Abstract

Wounds result from different causes (e.g., trauma, surgeries, and diabetic ulcers), requiring even extended periods of intensive care for healing, according to the patient's organism and treatment. Currently, wound dressings generated by polymeric fibers at micro and nanometric scales are promising for healing the injured area. They offer great surface area and porosity, mimicking the fibrous extracellular matrix structure, facilitating cell adhesion, migration, and proliferation, and accelerating the wound healing process. Such properties resulted in countless applications of these materials in biomedical and tissue engineering, also as drug delivery systems for bioactive molecules to help tissue regeneration. The techniques used to engineer these fibers include spinning methods (electro-, rotary jet-), airbrushing, and 3D printing. These techniques have important advantages, such as easy-handle procedure and process parameters variability (type of polymer), but encounter some scalability problems. RJS is described as a simple and low-cost technique resulting in high efficiency and yield for fiber production, also capable of bioactive agents' incorporation to improve the healing potential of RJS wound dressings. This review addresses the use of RJS to produce polymeric fibers, describing the concept, type of configuration, comparison to other spinning techniques, most commonly used polymers, and the relevant parameters that influence the manufacture of the fibers, for the ultimate use in the development of wound dressings.

Keywords: drug delivery; healing; medical applications; nanofibers; polymers; processing; rotary jet spinning (RJS); wound dressings.

Figure 1

Scheme of the wound dressing action in the healing process (own drawing).

Figure 2

Publications about the RJS technology and the areas related to it in a bibliometric analysis performed by the free software VosViewer [65] with Scopus data.

Figure 3

RJS apparatus: (A) collector, (B) reservoir, (C) motor, (D) feeding zone (modified with permission from [69], Copyright 2015 American Chemical Society).

Figure 4

Polymer molten jet formation in the RJS apparatus (modified with permission from [74], Copyright 2018, IOP Publishing Ltd.).

Figure 5

Melt RJS scheme (modified with permission from [72], Copyright 2012 American Chemical Society).

Figure 6

Immersion RJS scheme (modified with permission from [78], Copyright 2017 John Wiley & Sons).

Figure 7

Polymeric finger prints from nozzle-less RJS increasing with processing time (modified with permission from [37], Copyright 2014 Elsevier).

Figure 8

Structures of different designs in the fabrication of nanofibers for drug delivery (created using Biorender—https://biorender.com/ (accessed on 9 august 2022)).