Exploring bioadhesion: insight on innovative strategies to investigate bioadhesive scaffolds

In the pharmaceutic field, materials with enhanced bioadhesive properties have been widely employed to produce scaffolds with deep interaction and adhesion to the biological surfaces, preventing them from dislocation and promoting cell homing, proliferation and growth. Parallelly, mucoadhesion has been extensively used to increase formulation retention onto the mucosal surface. This review aims to describe the most appropriate and relevant techniques to evaluate scaffolds bioadhesion and mucoadhesion for biomedical application, and more in details, in wound healing treatment. Different methods will be reviewed and described in order to provide an overview of the traditional approaches and the most innovative and recent tools. In addition, critical considerations on the variety of biological substrates that could be used will be reported to underline the different alternatives for testing bioadhesion, including ex-vivo and artificial options. Biomaterials, with a particular focus on bioadhesives, will be presented, as well as the mechanisms that govern bioadhesion and mucoadhesion.