Functionalisation of electrospun nanofibres: addressing complications in wound healing using limonene as an antibacterial agent and microalgae as a source of oxygen
Creators: name: Williams, Leah
Publisher: name: Loughborough University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 401699
subject: Materials engineering not elsewhere classified

description: Damage to living tissues can leave the body's natural defences and mechanisms of healing compromised, resulting in susceptibility to uncomfortable and harmful environmental factors and limitations in the healing process. At present, the two primary complications seen within clinical wound management are infection and hypoxia. The beneficial implications of developing a system which could overcome these are associated with an accelerated wound healing process; the time required for wound care would be reduced, therefore also shortening the duration of pain, trauma, or even disability, while improving quality of life, and healthcare costs and treatment times would also see reductions.Electrospun fibres have been identified as holding potential in wound healing, primarily due to attractive features of the technique like versatility, rapid and simple production, and low production cost. Advantages of the produced material include a great control over the produced morphology, the ability to produce structures with a large surface area to volume ratio, and secondary surface structures such as nano-pores and nano-protrusions. Electrospinning offers several benefits for drug delivery applications too, which include effective encapsulation of bioactive compounds, ease of processing of biocompatible and biodegradable polymers, control over the chemical composition, diameter, and organisation (random or aligned networks) of fibres, relatively low-cost experimental apparatuses, scalable production rate, and compatibility with sterilization procedures. These characteristics combine to put electrospinning forward as a contender for producing functionalised wound dressings.Within the scope of this thesis, electrospun fibres of varying chemistries have been loaded either with the antibacterial essential oil, limonene, or various unicellular photosynthetic microorganisms, with the objective of developing functionalised materials suitable for application as a wound dressing material capable of reducing wound healing complications associated with infection and hypoxia, respectively. The materials developed were characterised to determine their properties and functionality. Specifically with the antibacterial systems based on limonene-loaded electrospun fibres, material characterisation also considered the evolution of the mechanical properties over time. In brief, from the work presented here, it can be concluded that functionalised electrospun fibres present themselves as excellent candidates for wound dressing materials; encapsulated essential oils can be released from polymer fibres over long time periods with controlled release profiles, and the release can be delayed by controlling storage conditions (adding to the clinical relevance of the system), while live photosynthetic microorganisms incorporated within electrospun matrices are capable of delivering oxygen to the local wound bed upon photo-stimulation. Future work stemming from these findings would include investigating how to develop a wound dressing system capable of simultaneous smart wound management and hypoxia regulation.