Recent trends on burn wound care: hydrogel dressings and scaffolds.

Acute and chronic wounds can cause severe physical trauma to patients and also result in an immense socio-economic burden. Thus, wound management has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, burn wound management is still a major challenge in wound management. Autografts are often considered the gold-standard for burn care, but their application is limited by many factors. Hence, ideal burn dressings and skin substitute dressings are desirable. With the development of biomaterials and progress of tissue engineering technology, some innovative dressings and tissue engineering scaffolds, such as nanofibers, films, foams and hydrogels, have been widely used in the field of biomedicine, especially in wound management. Among them, hydrogels have attracted tremendous attention with their unique advantages. In this review, we discuss the challenges in burn wound management, several crucial design considerations with respect to hydrogels for burn wound healing, and available polymers for hydrogels in burn wound care. In addition, the potential application and plausible prospect of hydrogels are also highlighted.

Mussel-inspired adhesive and polypeptide-based antibacterial thermo-sensitive hydroxybutyl chitosan hydrogel as BMSCs 3D culture matrix for wound healing.

Hydrogels have gained great attentions as wound dressing. Binding to the tissue and preventing wound infection were the basic requirements for an "ideal dressing". We employed l-DOPA and ε-Poly-l-lysine to modify thermo-sensitive hydroxybutyl chitosan (HBC) to obtain (l-DOPA) - (ε-Poly-l-lysine)-HBC hydrogels (eLHBC). The eLHBC exhibited an almost 1.5 fold (P < 0.01) increase in wet adhesion strength compared to HBC. Upon the introduction of ε-Poly-l-lysine, eLHBC presented inherent antimicrobial property and prevented wound infection and inflammation response. Bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) encapsulated in the eLHBC (BMSCs ⊂ eLHBC) could secret cytokins and growth factors via paracrine and promote the migration of fibroblast cells. BMSCs ⊂ eLHBC enhanced the complete skin-thickness wound healing via promoting collagen deposition and inhibiting infection and inflammation in vivo with wound closure rate being above 99 % after 15 days. The bioinspired, tissue-adhesive eLHBC could serve as advanced wound dressings for facilitating tissue repair and regeneration.