Emerging chitin and chitosan nanofibrous materials for biomedical applications

Abstract

Over the past several decades, we have witnessed significant progress in chitosan and chitin based nanostructured materials. The nanofibers from chitin and chitosan with appealing physical and biological features have attracted intense attention due to their excellent biological properties related to biodegradability, biocompatibility, antibacterial activity, low immunogenicity and wound healing capacity. Various methods, such as electrospinning, self-assembly, phase separation, mechanical treatment, printing, ultrasonication and chemical treatment were employed to prepare chitin and chitosan nanofibers. These nanofibrous materials have tremendous potential to be used as drug delivery systems, tissue engineering scaffolds, wound dressing materials, antimicrobial agents, and biosensors. This review article discusses the most recent progress in the preparation and application of chitin and chitosan based nanofibrous materials in biomedical fields.

Chitin and Chitosan Nanofibers: Preparation and Chemical Modifications

“…By virtue of chitin NFs' reinforcing effect, chitin NFs could significantly increase the Young's moduli and tensile strengths of acrylic resins, and decrease thermal expansion without losing transparency or flexibility. Moreover, chitin NFs have powerful biological activities and several applications were proposed in biomedical field [64][65][66][67][68]. For instance, they have anti-inflammatory actions via the suppression of NF-κB and MCP-1 activations and they suppress fibrosis in an acute ulcerative colitis mouse model, indicating that chitin NF is potentially a novel medicine or functional food for patients with inflammatory bowel disease [69,70].…”

Intracellular targeted co-delivery of shMDR1 and gefitinib with chitosan nanoparticles for overcoming multidrug resistance

“…31,32 NPs can be internalized more specifically and efficiently than free therapeutic agents, and, more importantly, NPs can be easily aggregated and accumulated inside tumor tissues for a long time, known as the enhanced permeability and retention effect. [33][34][35][36][37] Genes loaded in NPs were effectively protected from the degradation of DNase I and serum, and this significantly improved the efficiency of transfection of shRNA in vitro in cells and nanovector delivery of gene increased its cytotoxicity and induced more cell apoptosis in cancer therapy. [38][39][40][41] Gefitinib, as the first selective inhibitor of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) tyrosine kinase domain, is widely used in the chemical therapy of many human cancers.…”

The parallel lives of polysaccharides in food and pharmaceutical formulations

“…This is most commonly achieved with spray drying [6,16] or electrospinning [17,18] where fine particles or fibers are generated with the active compound entrapped a glassy matrix.…”