Development of Novel Multifunctional Electroactive, Self-Healing, and Tissue Adhesive Scaffold To Accelerate Cutaneous Wound Healing and Hemostatic Materials

Asghar Khan; Wajid Rehman; Mohammed M Alanazi; Yaqoob Khan; Liaqat Rasheed; Abdul Saboor; Shahid Iqbal

doi:10.1021/acsomega.3c04135

Development of Novel Multifunctional Electroactive, Self-Healing, and Tissue Adhesive Scaffold To Accelerate Cutaneous Wound Healing and Hemostatic Materials

ACS Omega. 2023 Oct 11;8(42):39110-39134. doi: 10.1021/acsomega.3c04135. eCollection 2023 Oct 24.

Authors

Asghar Khan¹, Wajid Rehman¹, Mohammed M Alanazi², Yaqoob Khan³, Liaqat Rasheed¹, Abdul Saboor¹, Shahid Iqbal⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry, Hazara University, Mansehra 21120, Pakistan.
² Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, College of Pharmacy, King Saud University, Riyadh 11451, Saudi Arabia.
³ Nano Science and Technology Department, National Centre for Physics, Quaid-I-Azam University, Islamabad44000,Pakistan.
⁴ School of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, College of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Soochow University, Suzhou, Jiangsu 215123, China.

Abstract

Designing a multifunctional conducting hydrogel wound dressing of suitable mechanical properties, adhesiveness, self-healing, autolytic debridement, antibacterial properties, and radical scavenging ability, as well as retaining an appropriate level of moisture around the wound is highly desirable in clinical application for treating cutaneous wounds healing. Here, we designed a novel class of electroactive hydrogel based on thiol-functionalized silver-graphene oxide nanoparticles (GO/Ag/TGA) core polyaniline (PANI) shell GO/Ag/TGA/PANI nanocomposites. Thus, a series of physically cross-linked hydrogel based on GO/Ag/TGA/PANI and poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) was prepared by freeze-thawing method. The hydrogel was characterized by XRD, UV, FTIR, TGA, TEM, SEM, Raman spectroscopy, cyclic voltammetry (CV), and four probes test. The hydrogel showed favorable properties such as excellent tensile strength, suitable gelation time (30-56 s), tunable rheological properties (G' ∼ 1 kPa), adhesiveness, and interconnected porous structure (freeze-dried). Besides this, the hydrogel also exhibits excellent exudate uptake capacity (10.4-0.2 g/g), high swelling ratio (72.4 to 93.5%), long-term antibacterial activity against multidrug-resistant (MDR) bacterial isolates, promising antioxidant (radical scavenging) efficiency, keeping the wound moisturized, prominent hemostatic efficiency, and fast self-healing ability to bear deformation. Interestingly, in vivo experiments indicated that electroactive hydrogels can significantly promote the healing rate of artificial wounds in rats, and histological analysis by H&E reveals higher granulation tissue thickness, collagen deposition, hair follicles, dermal papillary, keratinocytes, and marked increase (P < 0.05) in hydroxyproline at the wound site during 15 days of healing of impaired wounds. On the basis of vivo and vitro assay results, it is concluded that electroactive-hydrogel-attributed multifunctional properties may serve as suitable scaffold for treating chronic wound healing and skin regeneration.