This project supports collaborative research by Dr. Abdelfattah Seyam, Department of Textile and Apparel Technology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina. The collaborating scientist is Dr. Ahmad Waly, National Research Center, Cairo, Egypt. They plan to study how to improve the healing performance of wound dressing through formation of high surface area chitosan/cellulose structures from electrospun nanofibers
Intellectual Merit: The collaborators will conduct fundamental research to develop and evaluate highly absorbable inexpensive chitosan/cellulose based structures with high surface area using electrospun nanofibers. The main goal is to form and evaluate composite structures for wound dressings. The structures consist mainly of two components. The first is a cellulose based hydrogelled material capable of absorbing at least 10 times of its weight of wound discharge liquids. The hydrogel fibrous structures will be formed by grafting with a vinyl monomer to impart hydrophilic functional groups. The second is a nonwoven layer of nanofibers formed by electrospinning the nanofibers from chitosan/cellulose solutions. The PIs will form a range of extremely thin nonwovens from chitosan/cellulose nanofibers using different blend ratios, electric fields, solution concentrations, and process speeds and study the impact of these on the formed structures (fiber diameter and orientation, surface area, and pore size). The combined fibrous structures of hyrogelled and nanofibers nonwoven will be evaluated for healing performance. Contact kill performance of the structures against range of bacteria and yeast in static test (AATCC Method 100) and dynamic mode (ASTM E-2149-01) will be evaluated. The percent reduction of bacteria (number killed as a percent of total number) as a function of time will be monitored (Modified ASTM E-2149-01). These tests assess healing performance/time of the developed fibrous structures. The healing performance will be correlated to the structural parameters of the nanofibers and the hydrogilled layers, in order to design wound dressings to meet specific needs.
Broader Impact: The results of this research should lead to design of wound dressings with predetermined structures and healing performance to fit specific needs. While the focus of this research is on wound dressing, the expected knowledge from such research will be helpful in developing inexpensive fibers for other applications such as hospital bed sheets, surgical gowns, and medical gloves. Two post-doctoral scientists and a graduate student from NCSU will be partially supported through this project. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities.
