Author(s): Rodrigues, Ana Cristina Costa
Date: 2021
Persistent ID: https://hdl.handle.net/1822/76033
Origin: RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho
Subject(s): BNC production optimization; Drug delivery system; Excision and chronic wound; Hyaluronic acid nanogel and vitamin D3; Kinetic´s of cell growth; Cinéticas de crescimento celular; Feridas de excisão e crónicas; Nanogeis de ácido hialurónico e vitamina D3; Otimização da produção de BNC; Sistema de libertação controlada
Wounds, in particular traumatic (e.g. burns) and chronic ones, are a major cause of morbidity, impaired life quality and high health care costs. They often result in long hospitalization stays, taking up substantial health resources in developed countries. Conventional treatments are often painful, expensive and may increase the infection risk, compromising the treatments’ time and success. In recent years, there have been efforts to develop new advanced methodologies to heal chronic wounds, including the topic use of growth factors or cell-based therapies. However, in many cases, the therapeutic efficacy is low, the therapies are expensive and require application in a clinical facility. Therefore, development of new therapeutics is absolutely necessary and important to satisfy these unmet clinical needs. So, this work comprised the development of a safe, easy-to-use and non expensive novel dressing, aimed at efficiently addressing these issues, by attaining faster and proper wound healing. The use of bacterial nanocellulose (BNC) has already demonstrated positive results in the treatment of different kinds of wounds. Additionally, BNC is considered a promising drug delivery system. In this work, BNC was conceived as a protective barrier against exogenous agents (particles, microorganisms) that can impair wound healing, and as a drug carrier for the controlled release of hydrophobic drugs, namely of vitamin D3 (Vit D3 ), an inducer of the endogenous expression of antimicrobial peptide (AMP) LL37, known for accelerating the wound healing process. In a first part of this project, the optimization of the static BNC production was performed, aiming at making it viable and economic at large scale. First, an experimental design, based on response surface methodology (RSM) - central composite design (CCD) - was used to optimize the culture medium for BNC production by Komagataeibacter xylinus BPR 2001, using a simple culture medium composition based on byproducts from the food industry. The optimal conditions for BNC production were (% (m/v)): molasses 5.38; CSL 1.91; ammonium sulphate 0.63; disodium phosphate 0.270; citric acid 0.115 and ethanol 1.38 % (v/v). The experimental and predicted maximum BNC production yields were 7.5 ±0.54 g/L and 6.64 ±0.079 g/L, respectively, after 9 days at 30 ºC. Furthermore, the effect of the surface area and culture medium depth on the BNC production yield and productivity were evaluated. BNC dry mass production increased with the surface area and with the medium volume (depth) and fermentation time. Also, as long as nutrients were still available in the culture media, the BNC mass productivity was maintained overtime. The pre-inoculum preparation (PIP) step was also optimized with regards to the (a) identification of an inexpensive culture medium for pre-inoculum leading to a high cell density; (b) analysis of the effect of the initial cellular concentration on the static production of BNC and (c) kinetics of cell growth throughout the different steps of pre-inoculum preparation, including static and stirred - laboratorial and pilot-scale – fermentations. The best composition for PIP medium was (% (m/v)): Glucose and Fructose syrup 1.5- 2.0; Corn Step Liquor (protein basis) 0.7; citric acid 0.115; Na2HPO4 0.27. The analysis of the cell growth kinetics in the different steps of PIP showed that a careful control on the culture time in each stage is advisable. The time required to reach the exponential phase was very different in each stage of PIP, reducing significantly from the static culture to the stirred culture and for large scale stirred culture, in a 75 L Bioreactor. In a second part of this work, the use of BNC as a drug carrier was addressed. Since Vit D3 is poorly water soluble, and thus not easily incorporated in the highly hydrophilic environment of the BNC membrane, Vit D3 was encapsulated in a self-assembled hyaluronic acid (HA)-based amphiphilic nanogel and then incorporated in the BNC membrane. The carrier was obtained by grafting hexadecylamine (Hexa) into the HA backbone (HA-Hexa). Vit D3 was successfully loaded into the nanogel (HA-Vit D3 ) with an encapsulation efficiency between 60-91 %. The loaded system- HA-Vit D3 - was embedded into BNC, conceived as a transdermal delivery system. The release of Vit D3 was monitored over time using a Franz cell device. Around 70 % of the initial Vit D3 available was released from BNC membranes in the first 48 h. Most importantly, we observed that the released Vit D3 still remained within the HA-Hexa nanogel carrier. Vit D3 is known to stimulate the endogenous production of human cathelicidin (LL37), which is known to accelerate wound healing. Thus, formulations of HA-Vit D3 and HA-LLKKK18 (an analogue of LL37) were tested in vivo, using excision and chronic wound in dexamethasone treated C57BL/6 and db+/db+ mice models, as to evaluate and compare their efficiency in wound repairing. However, the results did not confirm any wound healing improvement.
