Effect of Royal Gel addition to chitosan matrix for wound dress applications: Fabrication, characterization and artificial neural network analysis

Abstract

In recent years, traditional and natural medicine products like royal gel (RG) can accelerate the healing of skin wounds. RG was used as an antibacterial material to improve the properties of biocompatible polymers like chitosan and alginate. In this research, RG polymer was added to the chitosan matrix for wound dress application using the freeze-drying technique. Mechanical and biological tests were evaluated to check the wound dressing properties of chitosan with 5 wt% RG. Then, X-ray diffraction (XRD), and scanning electron microscope (SEM) analysis were used to study the phase and morphology of the wound dressing. The sample with 5% RG has better mechanical and chemical properties than pure chitosan wound dressing. In general, the mechanical and physical properties of RG show an increase in elastic modulus from 32 MPa to 62 MPa. Moreover, an increase was observed for the tensile modulus from 1.4 MPa to 3.9 MPa. Although the porosity of wound dressings increased from 76% to 85% by adding 5 wt% RG to chitosan. For the first time, prepared chitosan-RG (5 wt%) was widely used for wound dressing applications.