Research status of self-healing hydrogel for wound management: A review

Abstract

Wound management has attracted significant interest in view of the broad demand market. Dressings are playing crucial roles in wounds management because they can protect the wound from external infection, and accelerate the healing process. Among the various available dressing materials, hydrogels have appealed increasing attention for their tunable chemical, physical and biological properties, and three-dimensional cross-linked polymer networks which can absorb and retain large amount of water. Although hydrogels have become representative of soft dressing materials, the design of conventional hydrogel materials still needs improvement. Nowadays, novel self-healing hydrogel wound dressings hopefully optimize the defects of mechanical property over conventional hydrogel thus extend their usage lifespan due to their potential of autonomous self-recovery against damage, which have gained much momentum recently. This presented review mainly focuses on research status of self-healing hydrogel for wound management. The polymers suitable for hydrogel forming, and the appropriate molecular design of the hydrogel network for achieving self-healing properties are discussed, followed by the applications of self-healing hydrogel as wound dressing. Finally, we discuss the future perspectives of self-healing hydrogel as wound dressing, and provide the recommendations for its possible developing orientation.

Keywords: Dressing; Hydrogels; Self-healing; Wound healing.