Bio-Printed Hydrogel Textiles Based on Fish Skin Decellularized Extracellular Matrix for Wound Healing

Abstract

Wound healing has always been a focus of clinical study due to its universality, difficult treatment, large number of patients, and heavy medical burden. A great deal of effort has been devoted to generating various wound dressings with special features and functions to satisfy specific demands. Here, we present novel bio-printed textiles based on fish skin decellularized extracellular matrix (dECM) for wound healing. Thanks to the desirable biocompatibility of the fish-derived dECM, the bio-printed textiles exhibit excellent performance in terms of cell adherence and proliferation. Since the dECM-based hydrogels are generated using a bio-printing method, the bio-printed textiles exhibit an adjustable porous structure with good air permeability throughout the whole textile. Moreover, the high specific surface areas of the porous structure on the hydrogel skeleton make it possible to load a variety of active molecules to improve the wound healing effect. According to an in vivo study, we demonstrate that the prepared textiles loaded with the active drug molecules curcumin (Cur) and basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) can significantly speed up the chronic wound healing process. These remarkable properties indicate the potential value of fish-skin-dECM textiles in wound healing and biomedical engineering.

Keywords

• Bio-printing
• Fish skin
• Decellularized extracellular matrix
• Hydrogel
• Wound healing