A Multifunctional Sericin Hydrogel System Fabricated by Acetic Acid One-Step Induction for Wound Management

Abstract

Hydrogels, particularly multifunctional hydrogels, are attractive wound dressing due to their abundant exudate absorption performance, oxygen permeability, comparable moisturizing ability, and performance of locally delivering therapeutic drugs. However, it is challenging to achieve hydrogels that enable mechanical properties comparable to human skin and can uniformly load hydrophobic drugs as multifunctional dressings for wound management. Herein, we report a simple and rapid fabrication of hydrogels by directly inducing sericin protein gelation using acetic acid. The resulting sericin hydrogels demonstrate high transparency, excellent physicochemical and biological properties, and promising wound dressing materials. Notably, this sericin hydrogel system could encapsulate hydrophobic drugs during gelation, thus overcoming the limitation of inadequate amount and non-uniform loading of therapeutic drugs in hydrogels. Further, we selectively encapsulated hydrophobic ciprofloxacin (CIP) into sericin hydrogel to obtain a multifunctional wound dressing with favorable antimicrobial activities. The obtained CIP-loaded sericin hydrogel exhibited antibacterial activity against both Gram-positive bacteria (S. aureus) and Gram-negative bacteria (P. aeruginosa) in vitro. The in vivo studies demonstrated that the CIP-loaded sericin hydrogel effectively eliminated bacteria in wounds and significantly accelerated wound healing. Taken together, this sericin hydrogel system is potentially a promising dressing material for wound management.

Note:
Funding declaration: This work was supported by the Earmarked fund for CARS-Sericulture (Grant No. CARS-18-ZJ0107), China; Doctoral Start-up Fund of Jiangsu University of Science and Technology (Grant No. 1732932204), China.

Conflict of Interests: The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Ethical Approval: All mice experiments were conducted following the guidelines and approved by the Ethics Committee of Jiangsu University of Science and Technology (Zhenjiang, China).

Keywords: Hydrogel, Sericin, acetic acid, hydrophobic drugs, wound healing