HYDROGEL AN NOVEL APPROACH FOR WOUND DRESSINGS: A REVIEW

Abstract

Skin is the largest organ of the human body, protecting it against the external environment. Despite high self-regeneration potential, severe skin defects will not heal spontaneously and need to be covered by skin substitutes. Tremendous progress has been made in the field of skin tissue engineering, in recent years, to develop new skin substitutes. This review has mainly been focused on achieving the specifications of an ideal wound dressing. This chapter discusses the use of hydrogels, both natural and synthetic, that can be used for wound healing applications. Owing to the merits of high porosity, good biocompatibility, tunable physicochemical properties, and being beneficial for wound healing, hydrogels with excellent performance have drawn intensive attention and numerous novel effective hydrogel dressings have been widely developed. In this Review, after introducing some commonly used strategies for the synthesis of hydrogels, the most recent progress on polymer-based hydrogels as wound dressings is discussed. Finally, challenges and future perspectives about the development of hydrogels for wound dressings are outlined.