Thermal-Responsive Behavior of a Cell Compatible Chitosan/Pectin Hydrogel

Biopolymer hydrogels are important materials for wound healing and cell culture applications. While current synthetic polymer hydrogels have excellent biocompatibility and are nontoxic, they typically function as a passive matrix that does not supply any additional bioactivity. Chitosan (CS) and pectin (Pec) are natural polymers with active properties that are desirable for wound healing. Unfortunately, the synthesis of CS/Pec materials have previously been limited by harsh acidic synthesis conditions, which further restricted their use in biomedical applications. In this study, a zero-acid hydrogel has been synthesized from a mixture of chitosan and pectin at biologically compatible conditions. For the first time, we demonstrated that salt could be used to suppress long-range electrostatic interactions to generate a thermoreversible biopolymer hydrogel that has temperature-sensitive gelation. Both the hydrogel and the solution phases are highly elastic, With a power law index of close to -1. When dried hydrogels were placed into phosphate buffered saline solution, they rapidly rehydrated and swelled to incorporate 2.7x their weight. As a proof of concept, we removed the salt from our CS/Pec hydrogels, thus, creating thick and easy to cast polyelectrolyte complex hydrogels, which proved to be compatible with human marrow-derived stem cells. We suggest that our development of an acid-free CS/Pec hydrogel system that has excellent exudate uptake, holds potential for wound healing bandages.