Fabrication of bio-active wound dressings containing carbopol blends and chitosan

The wound dressing is an essential material tailored for protecting a wound from the environmental conditions as well as healing of that wound. Actually, many dressings are present in the medical market. This research work aims to formulate different wound dressings via treating non-woven cotton fabric samples with different blends of carbopol® (CP) with arabic gum (AG), sodium alginate (ALG), or carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) as a polyanionic layer followed by crosslinking with chitosan (CS) as a polycationic layer. Factors affecting building up of the CP/AG/CS dressings such as AG/CP weight ratio, CS concentration, coating layers number, and dressing formulation type were investigated. The results revealed that the best performance properties, i.e. percent swelling, air permeability, stiffness, and tensile strength, of the prepared CP/AG/CS dressing were achieved at weight ratio 25/75 of CP/AG respectively and 2% of CS. Moreover, increasing number of the coating layers positively affects swellability as well as tensile strength but negatively reduces the air permeability of such dressing. Among the CP/AG, CP/ALG, and CP/CMC blends, the later was the best blend from the performance properties point of view. Furthermore, to enhance the antibacterial properties of the prepared CP/CMC/CS dressing, silver nano-particles were added during its preparation. The CP/CMC/CS dressing was characterized via SEM and EDX analysis.