A skin-like nanostructured membrane for advanced wound dressing

Abstract

An ideal wound dressing should include excellent physical property, comfortability, and protection. Critical properties, such as robust tensile stress, high water vapor transmission rate (WVTR), air permeability (AP), waterproofness, biocompatibility, and particle filtration efficiency (PFE) should be covered. However, previous research regarding wound dressings omitted some of these elements, leading to the fact that wound healing management was ineffective. Herein, inspired by human skin structure, we designed a skin-like wound dressing with a hydrophilic healing interlayer and a hydrophobic protective surface based on polyvinylidene fluoride. The prepared membrane not only possesses an excellent physical property, comfortability, and protective function but also can accelerate cell migration and the wound healing process. Particularly, the dressing demonstrates robust tensile stress of 25.9 MPa, a toughness of 12.2 MJ/m3, a typical WVTR over 17.4 kg/(m2·d), a high AP of 4.2 mL/s, a high PFE of 99.9%, excellent biocompatibility, and a more rapid scratch healing rate than the commercial product, Nexcare. The dressing is proven to be similar to human skin (i.e., tensile strength of 21.6 ± 8.4 MPa and failure strain of 54 ± 17%). We believe that the achieved scalable nanostructured membrane can make meritorious contributions to materials science and biomedical engineering.