  Polymer-based hydrogels have been widely applied for chronic wound
therapeutics, due to their well-acclaimed wound exudate management capability.
At the same time, there is still an unmet clinical need for simple wound
diagnostic tools to assist clinical decision-making at the point of care and
deliver on the vision of patient-personalised wound management. To explore this
challenge, we present a one-step synthetic strategy to realise a
redox-responsive, hyaluronic acid (HA)-based hydrogel that is sensitive to
wound environment-related variations in glutathione (GSH) concentration. By
selecting aminoethyl disulfide (AED) as a GSH-sensitive crosslinker and
considering GSH concentration variations in active and non-self-healing wounds,
we investigated the impact of GSH-induced AED cleavage on hydrogel dimensions,
aiming to build GSH-size relationships for potential point-of-care wound
diagnosis. The hydrogel was also found to be non-cytotoxic and aided L929
fibroblast growth and proliferation over seven days in vitro. Such a material
offers a very low-cost tool for the visual detection of a target analyte that
varies dependent on the status of the cells and tissues (wound detection) and
may be further exploited as an implant for fibroblast growth and tissue
regeneration (wound repair).
