Recent advances in polysaccharide-derived piezoelectric nanogenerators for wound healing application
Sivaraj Mehnath
Abstract
Chronic and refractory wounds remain a persistent clinical challenge, pose a significant health risk to patients over 60 years of age, and are its cause of substantial socioeconomic burdens. This challenge was spurred substantial attention in developing of electrical stimulation-based treatment strategies to improve the wound healing mechanism. The electrical stimulation triggers the cell migration, proliferation, differentiation, Reactive oxygen species (ROS), and cytokine release, which significantly accelerates the repair mechanism. Conversely, traditional electrical devices have numerous problems, like portability, biosafety, and long-term usage. But the piezoelectric materials were capable of converting the mechanical movement/stimuli into localized electrical stimulation, which induces the wound healing process. Polysaccharides were the promising piezoelectric nanogenerators (NG) due to their natural structural alignment, non-centro-symmetric crystal structure, and tunable physicochemical properties. Functional integration and hybridization of piezoelectric materials with polysaccharides improve the charge storage, ionic conduction, and electromechanical responsiveness. It also improves the structural integrity, intrinsic chirality, and mechanical property, also renders to an ideal next-generation wound dressing material. This review work explores the advancement in designing, fabrication, and wound-healing application of polysaccharide-derived piezoelectric NG. The detailed information about the preparation of self-power/stimuli-responsive material fabrication and the effective energy harvesting to trigger the wound healing mechanism was discussed. Finally, this review concludes with a limitation, a discussion of the current challenges and future directions of piezoelectric-polysaccharides for wound healing applications.