Application of metal-based biomaterials in wound repair

Abstract

• Metal elements played an irreplaceable role in regulating and accelerating wound repair. • Based on the dimensionality of metal nanomaterials, we divide the common metal-based nanomaterials into 0D, 1D, 2D and 3D nanomaterial. • We summarized the advances and impacts of metal-based biomaterials for wound repair. Wound repair, as one of the most intricate biological mechanisms, is essential to ensure the formation and integrity of the skin barrier. However, multiple factors can cause delays and severe debilitating effects in wound repair, which bring serious challenges. Metal elements such as calcium, copper, iron, and zinc serve irreplaceable roles in various regulatory pathways of the human body and directly or indirectly affect the orderly wound repair process. Biomaterials have proven to be an attractive strategy that can be applied to wound repair and have excellent potential to induce skin regeneration. In recent decades, with in-depth research on the regulatory mechanisms of metal elements involved in wound repair, metal-based biomaterials have been widely reported. Metal-based zero-dimensional (0D) biomaterials such as Ångstrom-scale metallic materials and metal quantum dots, metal-based one-dimensional (1D) biomaterials such as nanorods, nanowires and nanofibers, metal-based two-dimensional (2D) biomaterials such as nanofilms and nanosheets, and metal-based three-dimensional (3D) biomaterials such as nanoframes have achieved remarkable results, which provide great support for accelerated wound repair. In this review, we systematically investigated the advances and impacts of various metal-based biomaterial platforms for wound repair to provide valuable guidance for future breakthroughs in wound treatment.