Composite hydrogels fabricated from CMC-PVA-GG incorporated with ZiF-8 for wound healing applications

The skin is at risk for injury to external factors since it serves as the body's first line of defense against the external environment. Hydrogels have drawn much interest due to their intrinsic extracellular matrix (ECM) properties and their biomimetic, structural, and durable mechanical characteristics. Hydrogels have enormous potential use in skin wound healing due to their ability to deliver bioactive substances easily. In this study, composite hydrogels were developed by blending guar gum (GG), polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), and carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) with crosslinker TEOS for skin wound treatment. The structural, surface morphology, surface roughness, and stability features of the composite hydrogels were characterized by several techniques, such as FTIR, SEM-EDX, AFM, and DSC. The increasing ZiF-8 causes more surface roughness, with decreased swelling in different media (Aqueous > PBS > NaCl). The increasing ZiF-8 amount causes less hydrophilic behavior and biodegradation with increasing gel fraction. The cytocompatibility of Zinc imidazolate framework-8 (ZiF-8) based composites was evaluated against fibroblast cell lines by cell viability, proliferation, and cell morphology. The increasing ZiF-8 caused more cell viability and proliferation with proper cell morphology. Hence, the results show that synthesized composite hydrogels may be a potential candidate for numerous wound repair applications.