Dual-Crosslinked Chitosan-Based Antibacterial Hydrogels with Tough and Adhesive Properties for Wound Dressing.

Biocompatible chitosan-based hydrogels have attracted extensive attention in wound dressing due to their human skin-like tissue characteristics. However, it is a crucial challenge to fabricate chitosan-based hydrogels with versatile properties, including flexibility, stretchability, adhesivity and antibacterial activity. In this work, a kind of chitosan-based hydrogels with integrated functionalities were facilely prepared by solution polymerization of acrylamide (AAm) and sodium p-styrene sulfonate (SS) in the presence of quaternized carboxymethyl chitosan (QCMCS). Due to the dual crosslinking between QCMCS and P(AAm-co-SS), the optimized QCMCS/P(AAm-co-SS) hydrogel exhibited tough mechanical properties (0.767 MPa tensile stress and 1100% fracture strain) and moderate tissue adhesion (11.4 kPa). Moreover, biological evaluation in vitro illustrated that as-prepared hydrogel possessed satisfactory biocompatibility, hemocompatibility and excellent antibacterial ability (against S. aureus and E. coli are 98.8% and 97.3%, respectively). Then, our hydrogels were tested in a rat model for bacterial infection incision in vivo, and the results showed that they can significantly accelerate epidermal regeneration and wound closure. This is due to their ability to reduce the inflammatory response, promote the formation of collagen deposition and granulation tissue. We believe that the proposed chitosan-based antibacterial hydrogels have the potential to be a highly effective wound dressing in clinical wound healing. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.