Keratose Self-Cross-Linked Wound Dressing for Iron Sequestration in Chronic Wounds

Chronic wound diseases affect a large part of the worldpopulation,and therefore, novel treatments are becoming fundamental. People withchronic wounds show high iron and protease levels due to genetic disordersor other comorbidities. Since it was demonstrated that iron playsan important role in chronic wounds, being responsible for oxidativeprocesses (ROS generation), while metalloproteinases prevent woundhealing by literally "eating" the growing skin, it iscrucial to design an appropriate wound dressing. In this paper, anovel bioactive dressing for binding iron in chronic wounds has beenproduced. Wool-derived keratose wound dressing in the form of filmshas been prepared by casting an aqueous solution of keratoses. Thesefilms are water-soluble; therefore, in order to increase their stability,they have been made insoluble through a thermal cross-link treatment.Fourier transform infrared (FTIR), differential scanning calorimetry(DSC), and thermogravimetric analyzer (TGA) analyses clarified thestructure and the properties of the keratose wound dressing films.The capability of this new biomaterial in iron sequestration has beeninvestigated by testing the adsorption of Fe3+ by inductivelycoupled plasma-optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES). The resultssuggest that the keratose cross-linked films can adsorb a large amountof iron (about 85% of the average amount usually present in chronicwounds) following pseudo-second-order kinetics and an intraparticlediffusion model, thus opening new perspectives in chronic wound care.Furthermore, the QSAR Toolbox was applied for conducting insilico tests and for predicting the chemical behavior ofthe C-Ker-film. All of the data suggest that the keratose bioactivedressing can significantly contribute to wound healing by mechanismssuch as iron depletion, acting as a radical scavenger, diminishingthe proteolytic damage, acting as a substrate in place of skin, and,finally, promoting tissue regeneration.