ice crystallization
A large number of people around the world suffer from chronic skin wounds each year. Often, chronic wounds such as skin ulcers are seen in older people suffering from circulation disorders and diabetic patients whose skin tissue has a poor capacity of regeneration. Currently, many treatment approaches focus primarily on managing the wounds.
Researchers have now taken a nanotechnology-based tissue engineering approach to accelerate the regeneration and repair of damaged tissues at the wound site by directing cells and tissues to grow towards the target site. Their hope is that this leads to the development of affordable and functional biodegradable wound dressings for accelerated healing of chronic skin wounds by promoting regeneration of local tissues.
“We show that 3D scaffolds with both aligned nanofibers and aligned interconnected macrochannels can be created with various biomacromolecules, including silk fibroin, using a facile guided ice-crystal growth and nanofiber assembly strategy,” Dr. Linpeng Fan, first author of a paper on this work (ACS Nano, “Creating Biomimetic Anisotropic Architectures with Co-Aligned Nanofibers and Macrochannels by Manipulating Ice Crystallization”), tells Nanowerk … read more