Fabrication of Antimicrobial Wound Dressings Using Silver-Citrate Nanorods and Analysis of Their Wound-Healing Efficacy

Abstract

Staphylococcus epidermidis is well-known not only as an innocuous normal flora species commonly isolated from human skin, but also as an important bacterial species to keep skin healthy, because this species can protect the human skin from pathogenic microorganisms. However, S. epidermidis turns into a potential pathogen in damaged skin, because these bacteria can easily form a biofilm on the wound area and provide antimicrobial resistance to other microorganisms embedded in the biofilm. Thus, it is important to kill S. epidermidis in the early stage of wound treatment and block the formation of biofilms in advance. In the present study, hydrogel wound dressings were fabricated using polyvinyl alcohol/ polyethylene glycol containing silver citrate nanorods, which have been proven to have strong antimicrobial activity, especially against S. epidermidis, and their wound-healing efficacy was investigated in vivo using a rat experiment.