Poornima Dubey
UCL School of Pharmacy
Dr. Poornima Dubey is presently working as a post doctoral researcher in UCL School of Pharmacy Department of Pharmaceutics in Prof. Duncan Craig research group. Dr. Dubey has received her Ph.D in Nanotechnology from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee India in 2016. Her research mainly focuses on development of various two dimensional and three dimensional nanoformulations including composite nanofibrous scaffolds incorporating metal nanoparticles, graphene oxide (GO) along with hydrogels and nanogels for various biomedical applications including antimicrobial wound dressing, cancer theranostics applications. Her current research interest is development of suitable nanoformulation for poorly water soluble drug for oral drug delivery.
An intricate amalgamation of polysaccharides and proteins represents the key components of dermis fibrous extracellular milieu. Amongst natural polysaccharides, honey offers unique medicinal and healing properties whereas gelatin characterizes commercially available protein biopolymer which could be electrospun and that makes them an attractive choice in design of skin tissue regeneration scaffolding. In this regime, present study introduced simplest electrohydrodynamic technique based novel bio-compatible, hydrophilic scaffolding nanomaterial for skin tissue regeneration as electrospun honey/gelatin/chitosan based biopolymeric blend nanofibers with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) as the supporting polymers. The effect of various parameters including concentration, viscosity and temperature was optimized to obtain the bead free nanofiber scaffold. Physiochemical characterization of nanofiber was done by various techniques. The FE-SEM and TEM analysis showed synthesis of bead free nanofiber for alone nanofiber and upto certain percentage of honey incorporation. Wettability and swelling studies confirms the sufficient hydrophilicity of nanofibrous scaffolds in order to permit fluid exchange and absorption of excess exudates. The scaffolding was further investigated for skin tissue engineering applications. The designed scaffolding showed enhanced adherence, growth, and proliferation of human skin fibroblast (NIH-3T3) cells seeded on the nanofibers when compared to cells seeded on TCPC and casted polymeric blend film which was further evident by FE-SEM micrograph. Additionally the cell morphological analysis showed enhanced cell proliferation with no cell death for many days. Remarkably, the honey/gelatin/chitosan blended nanofibrous scaffold offers unique biocompatible, biodegradable, biomimetic substitute as temporary biomedical grafting material for induction of` skin tissue regeneration.
Figure 1: FESEM micrograph showing the optimization of blended nanofibers.
Figure 2: a) The TEM micrographic and b) FESEM micrographic image depicting optimized honey incorporated nanofibers.
Figure 3: Wettability analysis of various nano-formulations (a-c).
Figure 4: FESEM micrograph showing proliferation of NIH-3T3 cells seeded nanofibrous scaffold after 3 days (a-b).
Acknowledgement:
This study was supported by DBT (no. BT/PR6804/GBD/27/486/2012), Government of India and IIC IIT Roorkee India.
References:
1. Dubey P, Gopinath P. RSC Adv. 2016, 6, 69103.
2. Sarhan WA, Azzazy HM, El-Sherbiny IM. ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2016; 10:6379-90.
3. Dhandayuthapani B, Krishnan UM, Sethuraman S. J Biomed Mater Res B Appl Biomater. 2010; 94:264-72.
