Abstract

Wounds in diabetics often exhibit delayed healing due to inflammatory responses and excessive exudate. Meanwhile, diabetic patients experience long-term hyperglycemia, which can easily lead to systemic metabolic disorders as well as impaired immune function. Based on this, researchers have designed many functional dressings. These dressings are designed to control inflammation and manage wound exudate, but are not available for clinical treatment due to the lack of extended-release drug delivery systems for chronic diabetic wounds. Therefore, the preparation of wound dressings with slow-release drug properties has become an attractive design strategy. Herein, we utilize the external hydrophilic and internal lipophilic properties of hydroxypropyl-β-cyclodextrin (HP-β-CD) to design TTO-loaded coaxial electrostatic spinning wound dressings by encapsulating the insoluble drug tea tree oil (TTO), in order to prolong the dressing change time, reduce inflammation and promote neoangiogenesis. Diabetic wound healing experiments demonstrated that TTO-loaded coaxial electrospun dressings possessed excellent anti-inflammatory properties (tumor necrosis factor-α and interleukin-6 (TNF-α and IL-6) decreased from 48.16 and 59.94 to 1.39 and 1.60 per field, respectively) and could rapidly promote diabetic wound healing within 12 days. This expands applications of nonwater-soluble drugs and coaxial electrospun dressings in the field of biomedical materials.