Multifunctional microneedle patches with aligned carbon nanotube sheet basement for promoting wound healing

Wound healing has become a health concern and economic burden worldwide for its high incidence and complexity. Attempts to improve wound treatment tend to develop biomedical patches with delicate structure design and functionality. In this paper, we present novel multifunctional microneedle patches with aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) sheet basement for promoting wound healing. Because of the outstanding biocompatibility, biodegradability and non-immunogenicity, hyaluronic acid (HA) is utilized to construct the CNT-integrated microneedle patch with vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) encapsulation. It was found that the aligned CNT layer basement could not only impart the composite microneedle patch with orientation morphology, but also endow the patch with controllable release performance, due to its photo-thermal or electro-thermal conversion capacity. Based on these features, we have demonstrated that the highly ordered microstructure of CNT could effectively induce the orientation of fibroblasts; while VEGF release could facilitate tubular formation of endothelial cells. Thus, the aligned CNT and VEGF-loaded multifunctional patch is beneficial to the wound repair process in a typical animal experiment. These results indicate that the proposed microneedle patch is potentially promising for regeneration medicine.