Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Calcium alginate being a natural haemostat, alginate based dressings is indicated for
bleeding wounds. The gel forming property of alginate helps in removing the dressing
without much trauma, and reduces the pain experienced by the patient during dressing
changes. It provides a moist environment that leads to rapid granulation and re epi-
thelialization. In a controlled clinical trial, significant number of patients dressed with
calcium alginate was completely healed at day 10 compared with the members of the
paraffin gauze group. Calcium alginate dressings provide a significant improvement in
healing split skin graft donor sites (O'Donoghue et al., 1997).
In another study with burn patients, calcium alginate significantly reduced the pain
severity and was favored by the nursing personnel because of its ease of care. The
combined use of calcium sodium alginate and a bio-occlusive membrane dressing
in the management of split-thickness skin graft donor sites eliminated the pain and
the problem of seroma formation and leakage seen routinely with the use of a bio-
occlusive dressing alone (Disa et al., 2001). A dressing with an optimal combination
of chitosan, alginate and poly ethylene glycol containing a synergistic combination of
an antibiotic and an analgesic was studied on human subjects with chronic non-healing
ulcers. It was observed that this material made the ulcer cleaner and had beneficial
effect in the control of infection. Application of chitosan wound dressing made the
chronic ulcers heal faster and also the ulcers became sterile than usually by take of lo-
cal applications. Alginate is currently used for a variety of industrial purposes, and the
production was hitherto exclusively based on brown seaweeds. However, the possibil-
ity to engineer bacterial production strains capable of producing tailor-made alginates
for medical applications especially has become increasingly attractive. In addition,
engineering of alginate molecules, by tailor-making their composition and properties
or by introducing cell-specific signals, represents an important step forward for future
novel application in the biotechnology field.
CoNClusioN
This review highlights the uses of chitosan-based derivatives for various biomedi-
cal applications. Chitosan has offered itself as a versatile and promising biodegrad-
able polymer. In addition, chitosan possesses immense potential as an antimicrobial
packaging material owing to its antimicrobial activity and non-toxicity. The functional
properties of chitosan films can be improved when chitosan films are combined with
other film forming materials such as SF, alginate and other biopolymers. All these
studies indicate that, in the near future, several commercial biomedical products based
on silk fibroin and chitosan will be available in the world market.
KeyWords
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alginate
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Biomedical
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Chitin
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Chitosan
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silk fibroin
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