Conductive Hydrogel Dressing with High Mechanical Strength for Joint Wound Healing

Abstract Hydrogel wound dressing can accelerate angiogenesis to achieve rapid wound healing, but traditional hydrogel dressings are difficult to meet the repair of joint sites due to their low mechanical strength. Therefore, we constructed the gel system by designing the chemical‐physical interpenetrating network structure to achieve high strength and high toughness of the hydrogel. The high‐strength double‐network hydrogels were synthesized by simple free radical polymerization and low‐temperature physicochemical cross‐linking in our experiments. The suspension was obtained by green reduction of graphene oxide with carboxymethyl chitosan, followed by the introduction of acrylamide (AM) to form a covalent cross‐linked network, which was immersed in ferric chloride solution to form metal ligand bonds, and finally the chemical‐physical dual cross‐linked network hydrogel wound dressing was prepared. Here, reduced graphene oxide can enhance electrical conductivity and excellent near‐infrared photothermal effect to the hydrogel. The cell viability of this novel wound dressing was above 90.0%, its hemolysis rate was below 2.0%, and the electrical conductivity could reach (6.89 ± 0.07 (mS/cm)). In addition, the stress‐strain curve demonstrated that the double cross‐linked network hydrogel could reach a stress of more than 0.8 MPa at 82.0% strain, and the cyclic compression experiment shows that it can still recover its original shape after five times of repeated compression. This work can provide a reference for the exploitation of high mechanical strength hydrogel wound dressings with good electrical conductivity and near‐infrared photothermal effect. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved