In situ light-activated materials for skin wound healing and repair: A narrative review

Dermal wounds are a major global health burden made worse by common comorbidities such as diabetes and infection. Appropriate wound closure relies on a highly coordinated series of cellular events, ultimately bridging tissue gaps and regenerating normal physiological structures. Wound dressings are an important component of wound care management, providing a barrier against external insults while preserving the active reparative processes underway within the wound bed. The development of wound dressings with biomaterial constituents has become an attractive design strategy due to the varied functions intrinsic in biological polymers, such as cell instructiveness, growth factor binding, antimicrobial properties, and tissue integration. Using photosensitive agents to generate crosslinked or photopolymerized dressings in situ provides an opportunity to develop dressings rapidly within the wound bed, facilitating robust adhesion to the wound bed for greater barrier protection and adaptation to irregular wound shapes. Despite the popularity of this fabrication approach, relatively few experimental wound dressings have undergone preclinical translation into animal models, limiting the overall integrity of assessing their potential as effective wound dressings. Here, we provide an up-to-date narrative review of reported photoinitiator- and wavelength-guided design strategies for in situ light activation of biomaterial dressings that have been evaluated in preclinical wound healing models.

Characterization strategies for the functional assessment of the cutaneous lesion

Assessment of wound healing is a complex task, especially when the lesion is associated to significant (full thickness) loss of the skin. The clinical observation, essentially subjective and highly dependent on the observer's experience, creates difficulties in the comparison of results. Scoring scales were introduced in the clinical practice to create comparable semi-quantitative data and promote better management of resources, but its usefulness in a clinical perspective is still limited. New non-invasive biometric methodologies, although infrequently used, have opened new possibilities. While complementing the clinical observation and contributing to therapeutic decisions and prognosis, they may also help to look further into the pathophysiological mechanisms of scarring drugs rehabilitation. Following previous work in this arena, the authors review, the state-of-the-art of cutaneous wound healing clinical and biometric follow up, proposing a diagnosis correlation for the most relevant descriptors found in both strategies in order to fully characterise the different stages of the healing process.