title: Hydrogel based smart bandage for chronic wound healing
Creators: name: Yu, Jingwen
Publisher: name: University of Glasgow
Year: 2025

description: Wound healing is one of the most complex natural processes[1] ; it requires the spatial and temporal synchronisation of different types of cells with distinct roles in the overlapping stages of haemostasis, inflammation, re-epithelialisation and remodelling. Most acute wounds can undergo regular self-healing and recover to intact tissue in a few weeks. Dysregulated wound repair events will lead to delayed healing and develop into chronic wounds, which tend to stall in the inflammation phase even for several months. Thus, timely and effective wound management during the healing process is of great significance for defencing bacterial infection and improving tissue healing. Skin wound repair requires the coordination of various host cells, which are also mediated by occupied microorganisms in the wound ecosystem. Therefore, appropriate management of bacterial contamination without disturbing the supportive host cells is crucial for chronic wound site treatment; very few works have been done in this field.

In this work, we have developed a visible light polymerised hydrogel with a semiconductor material doping, graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) material, which acts as both initiator and reinforcer in the hydrogel polymerisation system. This work aims to provide an effective hydrogel system that can be used as a chronic wound healing bandage with desirable properties of wound site management patches[2] , such as good biocompatibility, better conformity, and suitable water vapour exchange. The successful development of such a new hydrogel can be significant in point-of-care devices. Quantitative reactive oxygen species (ROS) can be formed from our visible light-activated hydrogel system in a controllable manner; it can effectively inactive different bacterial strains. In alignment with the urgent demand for a solution to antimicrobial resistance (AMR)[3] , our photocatalytic-generated ROS can realise bacterial killing without drug inducement. In particular, g-C3N4 hydrogel system can selectively kill bacteria over mammalian cells in the co-existed environment; this work provides insights into the novel chronic wound management method that can stop the bacterial infection and restore the host cell environment through the homeostasis regulation using strictly controlled redox biological process[4] . In parallel, this system can also destroy the compact biofilm to break the being seriously hindered healing process. The results of this thesis suggested that our developed g-C3N4 hydrogel system can be used as a promising chronic wound healing bandage material; it can effectively break the biofilm covering for wound healing sequences initiation and improving the healing process by ROS participation, realising bacterial infection elimination but also shaping the host immune response to against future invasions by signalling pathways transduction.

In all, our g-C3N4 hydrogel platform provides a promising concept that ROS released from the photocatalyst-doped hydrogel can successfully be used for complex chronic wound environment regulation, and visible light irradiation also gives an opportunity for wearable device development.