Zwitterionized chitosan based soft membranes for diabetic wound healing

Abstract In what follows, we functionalized chitosan soft membranes using zwitterionic copolymers of glycidyl methacrylate (GMA) units and sulfobetaine methacrylate (SBMA) segments in order to develop wound-dressings for diabetic wound healing. The focus was first laid on a careful physicochemical characterization of the materials, and on the optimization of the surface modification process by varying the GMA/SBMA molar ratio in the copolymer, in order to achieve low biofouling by bacteria, cells from whole blood and HT1080 fibroblasts cells. Functionalization with the copolymer referred to as G20S80, actually containing 67.7 mol% of GMA, permitted to almost entirely mitigate biofouling, consistent with efficient grafting process leading to an important improvement of the hydrophilic properties of the soft membranes. The optimized materials were used on skin wounds of diabetic rats (type 1 diabetes), and were shown to outperform not only unmodified chitosan but also a commercial dressing in terms of wound healing rate and histological quality of the newly formed tissue. Therefore, these unique soft porous and biofouling-resistant membranes open a new avenue to the development of efficient biomaterials for chronic wound recovery.