Self-healing hydrogel based on oxidized pectin with grafted dopamine as gallic acid carrier for burn wound treatment.

When the barrier function of the skin tissue is destroyed, the burn wound is prone to bacterial infection and difficult to repair during the healing process. Therefore, there is an urgent need to design functional dressing materials to promote burn wound repairing. In this research, injectable hydrogel with mussel-inspired tissue adhesion was fabricated from dopamine grafted oxidized pectin (OP-DA) and hydrazide terminated polyethylene oxide (PEO-AH) as dressing material for burn wounds. The catechol moiety on the grafted dopamine (DA) enhanced the tissue adhesion of hydrogel and the wound sealing performance, which can well adhere onto the skin to cover irregular wounds for consistent sealing under body moving. On this basis, the hydrogel also showed hemostatic performance based on liver and tail hemostasis model. The hydrogel was further loaded with gallic acid (GA) to enhance the antibacterial property to E. coli and S. aureus to inhibit wound infection. Along with good biocompatibility and biodegradability, the hydrogel showed improved burn wound repairing performance to second-degree burn wound models on mice. As a result, the OP-DA/PEO-AH hydrogel showed great advantage as GA carrier in wound healing applications.