Abstract
Over the past decade, there has been a strong growing interest in using several forms of chitosan, more specifically nanofibers, for various biomedical applications. Chitosan has several impressive biological characteristics including but are not limited to its great biocompatibility and biodegradability, anti-bacterial properties, and cytocompatibility. In order to create nanofibers from this natural polymer, the electrospinning has been widely used as the most effective technique to produce a stable structure. Overtime, a number of challenges have been overcome through the development of mechanically and structurally intact, biocompatible and multi-functional nanofibers. The recent progress of the nanofibrous structure of chitosan and their biomedical applications in tissue engineering, drug delivery, wound dressing, and antimicrobial are discussed.
Highlights
Chitosan is an N-deacetylated product of chitin, a helical polysaccharide macromolecule found in the exoskeleton of crustaceans such as crabs, shrimp, insects, and other arthropods and is the second most abundant natural biopolymer after cellulose
Several studies have been explored using polyblend systems comprising of an aqueous solution of chitosan with hydrophilic- synthetic polymers such as polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), polyethylene oxide (PEO) and surfactants such as Triton X-100 as one of the biologically friendly methods to make chitosan nanofibers [48,50]
One particular study done by Zhang et al [67] was able to electrospin composite nanofibers containing hydroxyapatite/chitosan for bone tissue engineering to design and fabricate bioactive scaffolds that resemble the native extracellular matrix
Summary
Chitosan is an N-deacetylated product of chitin, a helical polysaccharide macromolecule found in the exoskeleton of crustaceans such as crabs, shrimp, insects, and other arthropods and is the second most abundant natural biopolymer after cellulose. A library of various polymer-solvent combinations which has a crucial role in transforming chitosan into nanofibers has been developed for many ground breaking applications in different disciplines of biomedical technology such as such as in tissue engineering, wound healing, drug delivery, and anti-bacterial applications [33,34,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47]. Several studies have been explored using polyblend systems comprising of an aqueous solution of chitosan with hydrophilic- synthetic polymers such as PVA, PEO and surfactants such as Triton X-100 as one of the biologically friendly methods to make chitosan nanofibers [48,50].
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