Abstract
Chronic wound infections represent a significant burden to healthcare providers globally. Often, chronic wound healing is impeded by the presence of infection within the wound or wound bed. This can result in an increased healing time, healthcare cost and poor patient outcomes. Thus, there is a need for dressings that help the wound heal, in combination with early detection of wound infections to support prompt treatment. In this study, we demonstrate a novel, biocompatible wound dressing material, based on Polyhydroxyalkanoates, doped with graphene platelets, which can be used as an electrochemical sensing substrate for the detection of a common wound pathogen, Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Through the detection of the redox active secondary metabolite, pyocyanin, we demonstrate that a dressing can be produced that will detect the presence of pyocyanin across clinically relevant concentrations. Furthermore, we show that this sensor can be used to identify the presence of pyocyanin in a culture of P. aeruginosa. Overall, the sensor substrate presented in this paper represents the first step toward a new dressing with the capacity to promote wound healing, detect the presence of infection and release antimicrobial drugs, on demand, to optimized healing.
Highlights
IntroductionA wound is considered to be chronic if it does not show evidence of progression through the normal healing stages within a timely manner, usually considered to be 30 days (Frykberg and Banks, 2015)
Chronic wound infections can have life changing consequences to patients and represent a significant burden to healthcare providers such as the NHS
In this study we explore the use of a novel biopolymer material, an medium chain length Polyhydroxyalkanoate (MCL-PHA), functionalized with graphene nanoplatelets (GnP) for the detection of the wound pathogen P. aeruginosa
Summary
A wound is considered to be chronic if it does not show evidence of progression through the normal healing stages within a timely manner, usually considered to be 30 days (Frykberg and Banks, 2015). A number of strategies have been explored to improve chronic wound outcomes. Tissue engineering approaches, such as the use of stem cells, modulating the immune response, and the use of scaffolds, cell therapies or growth factors are widely reported (Rezaie et al, 2019). Evidence based decision systems have been developed to progress from decision based support systems (Schaarup et al, 2018) and a large field of research is devoted to the point of care monitoring and analysis of chronic wounds (Sheets et al, 2016)
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