Bioinspired Adhesive Marine Based Hydrogels For Wound Healing Applications

Given advances in the treatment of various diseases such as cancer, where specific treatment for targeted tissues or polytherapy is a common practice, our toolkit for wound healing is relatively empty. Patients with chronic wounds such as venous leg ulcers, pressure ulcers, or foot ulcers not only suffer from pain but also are exposed to the risk of severe infection and amputation. There is an immense need for smart biomaterials to address acute inflammation and antibiotic-resistant organisms in infected wounds. Marine-based polysaccharides have shown a great interest in tissue engineering, particularly in wound healing acceleration, due to their inherent nontoxicity, biocompatibility, biodegradability, and environmental friendliness as a green and renewable resource. Chitooligosaccharides (COS), as a depolymerized product of chitosan, is a marine oligosaccharides with high water solubility and superior biological activity due to its lower molecular weight. Hence, this thesis aims to investigate the effect of COS molecular weight and structure on the biological activity toward wound healing applications and to develop anti-infectious bioadhesive wound dressing hydrogels, which can release novel chitooligosaccharides (COS) as bioactive compounds for chronic skin wounds.The first chapter indicates that the oxidative degradation of chitosan was a safe method to produce COS without structure alteration. this chapter's results revealed that decreasing the molecular weight of COS could improve biological activity such as antibacterial, cell proliferation, and collagen production, indicating that COS can be a promising bioactive agent in biomedical applications, in particular for wound healing applications. Although COS exhibited a superior wound healing potential compared to chitosan, its low molecular weight hiders its ability for hydrogel formation, hence, in the second chapter, a 3D printable hydrogel using phenol functionalized marine polysaccharides such as chitosan
Doctorat en Sciences de l'ingénieur et technologie
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished