Researchers from the Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, have recently developed a new generation of dressings specifically designed for viscous exudates, such as those found in diabetic foot ulcers. This research provides a new approach for the removal of viscous exudates and the treatment of chronic wounds. The related research findings have been published online in the journal "Advanced Materials."
Chronic wounds that are difficult to heal often have a large amount of viscous exudate on their surface, which can easily irritate the wound and lead to persistent inflammation, infection, or even further enlargement of the wound. This presents a significant challenge in the clinical treatment of chronic wounds. Traditional wound dressings, such as gauze, sponges, and hydrocolloids, can absorb low-viscosity exudates, but they are prone to blockage by high-viscosity exudates, leading to ineffective removal and potentially exacerbating the wound by saturating the surrounding skin and hindering proper healing.
Therefore, in clinical practice, external physical methods such as saline irrigation, physical debridement, and negative pressure wound therapy are often required to remove high-viscosity exudates, inevitably causing secondary trauma and ongoing pain stimulation. Thus, the development of a new generation of wound dressings capable of efficiently removing high-viscosity wound exudates presents a significant challenge.
The team led by Dr. Wang Shutao and Associate Professor Shi Lianxin from the Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has been engaged in research on wound exudate management. Since proposing the concept of "self-pumping" unidirectional exudate dressings in 2018, they have been committed to addressing the difficulties in wound healing caused by excessive exudation. They have successively developed orientation-type and fractal-type self-pumping dressings, achieving continuous and rapid unidirectional exudate drainage, thereby addressing slow healing issues such as infected wounds and burns.
To address high-viscosity exudates, the team developed a three-dimensional infiltration-induced transfer strategy and prepared a self-pumping oil-water hydrogel with hydrated channels, which achieved the drainage of high-viscosity liquids and shortened the healing time of diabetic wounds by nearly one-third.
The self-pumping dressings prepared in this study demonstrated a unidirectional exudate flux of up to 41.67 microliters per second, an increase of over 8 times compared to similar dressings, and could drain simulated exudates with a viscosity as high as 90 millipascal-seconds, compared to serum viscosity of approximately 1.4 millipascal-seconds. This research provides a feasible solution to the problem of difficult wound healing caused by high-viscosity exudates and holds great promise in the fields of medical dressings and exudate management.
Image provided by the Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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