Wound dressing applications of nano-biofilms

The World Health Organization (WHO) indicates that nearly 14 million people worldwide suffer from infected or chronic wounds every year. Innovative, biocompatible, and biodegradable wound dressing materials designed from nanotechnology are widely used in wound healing. This chapter discusses recent advances of nano-biofilms for wound dressing applications. According to the literature, silk fibroin-polyvinyl alcohol (SF-PVA), gelatin-PVA, and calcium alginate-PVA blends have been used in the past for wound dressing applications, but these films did not show any antibacterial activity at neutral pH, which limited their use. This problem can be overcome by coating hybrid chitosan-zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles on SF-PVA biofilms. A reported study observed that the prepared nano-biofilms showed enhanced antibacterial activity, mechanical property, high wound exudate uptake capacity, biocompatibility, and biodegradability. Hence, all the obtained results confirmed that nanoparticle-coated films have huge potential to be used as dressing materials for infected wounds.