A critical challenge in many pharmaceutical fields is developing versatile adjuvant devices that can reduce the off-target delivery of therapeutic materials to target lesions. Herein, a biphasic hybrid fibrous system that can manipulate the spatial and temporal delivery of various therapeutic agents to target lesions by integrating multiple distinct systems and technologies such as fluffy coaxial electrospun polycaprolactone (PCL)/polystyrene (PS) fibers, cyclohexane-mediated leaching to remove PS layers selectively, amine display on PCL fibers, conjugation of naturally occurring adhesive gallol molecules onto hyaluronic acid (HA-g), and electrostatically complexing the aminated PCL fibers with the gallol-conjugated HA. In the context of "paintable" systems on target lesions, the resulting system is called a PAINT matrix (abbreviated according to the initial letter of its features: pastable, adhesive, injectable, nanofibrous, and tunable). Its viscoelastic property, which was attributed by coalescing aminated PCL fibers with viscous HA-g, enabled it to be noninvasively injected and fit into any cavity in the body with various morphologies, manually pasted on tissue surfaces, and adhered onto moisture-rich surfaces to ensure the secure delivery of therapeutics toward the target lesions. The PAINT matrix efficiently supplied immunomodulatory human neural stem cells (hNSCs) at rat hemisectioned spinal cord injury (SCI) sites and promoted both locomotive and sensory recovery in SCI models, presumably by protecting hNSCs against host immunosurveillance. The PAINT matrix will be broadly utilized for efficiently delivering therapeutics to difficult-to-reach target lesions by direct infusion or conventional biomaterial-mediated approaches due to their locations, wet surfaces, or complicated ambient environments.
Keywords: adhesive fibers; biphasic hybrid; electrospun fibers; pastable fibers; spinal cord injury.