Development of a New Chitosan Hydrogel for Wound Dressing

This article explores new advances in wound dressing to decrease recovery time for cutaneous skin injuries. Skin loss can be traumatic to the body, causing fluid loss, hypothermia, scarring, and infection. If the organism survives the initial skin loss, the healing process is complicated and often long depending on the extent of skin loss. New research is being conducted to find biocompatible materials that can speed up the healing process to minimize dehydration, infection, and other problems with skin loss. Some researched materials include polymers extracted from the extracellular matrix, such as collagens and glycosaminoglycans. However, the article points out that their biological inertness makes them ineffective at speeding up the healing process. A material is needed that provides a good environment for certain healing process like fibroblast formation. The material described in this article is a chitosan hydrogel (CH). Chitosan is the deacetylated derivative of the natural polysaccharide chitin. Chitin is found in the exoskeletons of arthropods and some fungi.

CH is apparently very biocompatible, it provides some advantages for healing cutaneous wounds. It was proved to be non-toxic to cells, namely fibroblasts, in some in-vitro tests. Its chemical properties, mainly how it can form hydrogen bonds with water, help it slow down water loss when applied to wounds. The study in the article found that the hydrogel accelerated the initial healing process. There are graphs in the article that show the wounds treated with hydrogel were statistically-significantly-smaller than the control group's wounds up until 9 weeks (rats were used as specimens). This seems to suggest that the hydrogel can speed up the initial healing process and therefore make the wound less vulnerable in the first stages of injury due to infection, dehydration, and hypothermia.

I found this article interesting because it shows how current technology is advancing to provide ways to heal wounds by engineering tissues. It would be interesting if instead of using Neosporin to treat a minor cut, you slapped a pad of CH on it. The results and benefits of using CH to treat burn wounds on rats could mean compounds like CH could save critically burned patients from death by dehydration, infection, and hypothermia.

here is the article,

I had to search for it while being logged into the library.tamu.edu website:

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com.lib-ezproxy.tamu.edu:2048/cgi-bin/fulltext/122648466/PDFSTART

MICHAEL SERAFINO

VTPP 435-502