Development of photothermal membrane for treatment of infected wound: A proof-of-concept

Wound infection is a serious issue because of multi-drug resistance bacteria, thus developing an advanced therapy is a needed demand. Photothermal therapy (PTT) is a novel noninvasive strategy that utilizes PTT agents to convert near-infrared (NIR) light energy into heat to kill living cells. In this work, we developed the PTT agent containing membrane to treat the wound infection for the first time. Palladium nanoparticles (PdNPs) were chosen as PTT agents owing to their high stability, good biocompatibility, excellent photothermal property, and simple-green preparation. Chitosan (CS) has been widely studied in tissue engineering due to its good properties such as biocompatible, biodegradable, antibacterial, and wound-healing abilities. However, the poor workability and high brittleness of CS limit the applications of CS in tissue engineering. Thus, we combined polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and CS to have the membrane with high flexibility, wettability, highly porosity. The test on cells showed that the membrane has high biocompatibility. The combination of PdNPs loading CS/PVA membrane and laser irradiation killed most of the bacteria in vitro.