Biomedical Applications of Biodegradable Polymers in Wound Care
According to the World Health Organization, it is estimated that 180,000 deaths occur annually due to burns. In the United States, it is expected that chronic wounds (e.g., diabetic and pressure ulcers) affect 6.5 million people. Thus, skin lesions are a public health problem that imposes the development of more sophisticated therapeutic approaches. Considering this, biodegradable polymeric wound dressings have advanced significantly in the last half-century, since the biodegradability of polymers avoids the dressing replacement and does not induce any immune response. The biodegradable polymers can have natural (e.g., alginate, chitosan, collagen, gelatin, hyaluronic acid) or synthetic origin (e.g., poly-ε-caprolactone, poly(lactide-co-glycolide), polyethylene glycol, and polyurethane).
Natural polymers are preferable due to their biocompatibility and similarity to macromolecules of the human body, whereas the synthetic polymers possess remarkable mechanical properties. This chapter outlines the use of biodegradable polymeric materials, natural and synthetic, on the production of wound dressings, describing their main degradation mechanisms and their in vitro and in vivo effects on the wound healing progression.
Article information: Miguel S.P., Ribeiro M.P., Coutinho P. (2021) Biomedical Applications of Biodegradable Polymers in Wound Care. In: Kumar P., Kothari V. (eds) Wound Healing Research. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2677-7_17