Negative Pressure Wound Therapy: Challenges, Novel Techniques, and Future Perspectives

Significance: Negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT) has been in practice for decades, proving its utility in many applications, ranging from acutely infected wounds to complex combat wounds and skin grafting. It has been routinely demonstrated that NPWT has superior wound healing outcomes compared with previous standard-of-care therapies. However, the technique involves some challenges related to each of the components that comprise the therapy. The purpose of this article is to highlight the challenges, introduce the recent advancements, and discuss about the future directions in NPWT systems. Recent Advances: New techniques and materials have been developed to improve the currently used NPWT systems with promising results when utilized with appropriate indications. Many advancements have been introduced in modes of negative pressure delivery, pumps, interface dressings, adhesive dressings, and tubing technology. Critical Issues: An optimal NPWT system would avoid the common problems such as failure to deliver negative pressure due to loss of an airtight seal or tissue ingrowth into the interface dressing causing painful dressing changes and bleeding. Other challenges include infection control and patient pain and discomfort that may contribute to noncompliance. Future Directions: Many studies have been performed to evaluate the optimal combination of settings and components in various wounds; however, there is still no clear "best" answer for many specific patient-wound scenarios. Novel and emerging tissue engineering and regenerative medicine approaches could potentially be utilized in the future NPWT systems and thus, this review will discuss some novel ideas for future considerations.