Bacterial Cellulose as Potential Dressing and Scaffold Material: Toward Improving the Antibacterial and Cell Adhesion Properties

Despite the significant advances in understanding wound healing and developing wound dressings, skin substitutes, and wound-healing agents, delayed wound closure remains a global health challenge. Moreover, the economic burden of wound management on the nation's health care system is considerable and on the rise. Due to possessing desirable features in improving wound healing and tissue regeneration, bacterial cellulose (BC) has attracted substantial attention in biomedical research and therapy. On the one hand, it can maintain moisture balance, guarantee gas exchange, hinder bacterial invasion, and be cost-effective, so it can be a suitable wound dressing. Due to biocompatibility, porous structure, mechanical strength, and mimicking the native extracellular matrix (ECM), on the other hand, it can be an adequate scaffold. As a regenerative medicine strategy, delivering mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) to wound bed through a tissue engineering scaffold has been shown to have beneficial effects on healing. However, BC, either as a wound dressing or as a scaffold, is not faultless. Therefore, for it to be considered excellent, it must be modified to confer antibacterial activity or reinforce the cell adhesion properties. Hence, numerous innovative approaches to promote the BC structure have been investigated to date. In this review, we will concisely discuss various modification approaches for developing more efficient BC as wound dressing and skin scaffold together, which can assist in paving the way toward their widespread application in promoting wound healing and epithelial regeneration in the future. We will also shed light on MSC application along with BC in improving wound healing.

Automated summary

Despite advancements in wound healing, delayed wound closure remains a global health challenge. Bacterial cellulose (BC) has attracted attention for its features in wound healing and tissue regeneration, but modifications are necessary to enhance antibacterial properties and cell adhesion.