Wound infection is a big issue of modern medicine because of multi-drug resistance bacteria; thus, developing an advanced therapy is curial. Photothermal therapy (PTT) is a newly noninvasive strategy that employs PTT agents to transfer near-infrared (NIR) light energy into heat to kill bacterial pathogens. In this work, the PTT agent-containing dressing was developed for the first time to treat the wound infection. Palladium nanoparticles (PdNPs) were chosen as PTT agents because of their high stability, good biocompatibility, excellent photothermal property, and simple-green preparation. With the flexibility and wettability, highly porous membrane chitosan/polyvinyl alcohol (CS/PVA) membrane was chosen as the dressing. The prepared wound dressings exhibited excellent biocompatibility, high porosity, a high degree of swelling, high moisture retention, and high photothermal performance. The treatment of PdNPs loading CS/PVA dressing (CS/PVA/Pd) and laser irradiation killed most of the bacteria in vitro. The proposed PTT agent containing wound dressing introduces a novel strategy for the treatment of wound infection.
Keywords: chitosan/polyvinyl alcohol membrane; infected wound; palladium nanoparticles; photothermal responsive membrane; would healing.