Hydrogel vectors based on peptide and peptide-like substances: For treating bacterial infections and promoting wound healing

Open wounds have the risk of infections with bacteria, but the direct use of antibiotics and other antibacterial drugs may cause bacteria to develop resistance and invade the human immune system. Liposomes, micelles and hydrogels are common drug vectors, and currently the most widely used dressing for open wounds is hydrogel. As a highly cross-linked three-dimensional network material, hydrogel is considered to be a material that has the ability to efficiently load and release drugs. Wound dressings usually require materials with high biological activity, but some synthetic materials will inevitably face the problem of unsatisfactory biocompatibility. Hydrogel vectors prepared with peptide and peptide-like substances avoid this problem. At present, hydrogel vectors based on peptide and peptide-like substances have been widely used in medical fields such as drug delivery, sterilization, tissue engineering, and promotion of wound healing. In this review, we first roughly classified antibacterial hydrogels based on peptide and peptide-like substances as hydrogel vectors, introduced the applications of various types of hydrogels, and then briefly summarized the research progress of these hydrogels in medical fields such as treating wound infections and promoting wound healing. Finally, we predicted the application prospects of hydrogel vectors based on peptide and peptide-like substances in clinical medicine, and made a simple outlook.