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REVIEW article
Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol.
Sec. Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2025.1454903
Innovative hydrogels in cutaneous wound healing: current status and future perspectives
Provisionally accepted
Prasad Sawadkar1
Ferdinand Lali1
Elena Garcia1
Abdullah Chaudhry2
Priya Matharu2Christos Kyriakidis2
Karin Greco1*- 1University College London, London, United Kingdom
- 2Northwick Park Institute for Medical Research, Harrow, United Kingdom
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Chronic wounds pose a substantial burden on healthcare systems, necessitating innovative tissue engineering strategies to enhance clinical outcomes. Hydrogels, both of natural and synthetic origin, have emerged as versatile biomaterials for wound management due to their structural adaptability, biocompatibility, and tunable physicochemical properties. Their hydrophilic nature enables efficient nutrient transport, waste removal, and cellular integration, while their malleability facilitates application to deep and irregular wounds, providing an optimal microenvironment for cell adhesion, proliferation, and differentiation. Extracellular matrix (ECM)- based hydrogels retain bioactive molecules that support cellular infiltration, immune modulation, and tissue remodelling, making them highly effective scaffolds for growth factor delivery and regenerative therapies. Additionally, their injectability and potential for in situ polymerization enable minimally invasive applications, allowing on-demand gelation at target sites. By modifying their mechanical properties through crosslinking, hydrogels can achieve enhanced structural stability, prolonged degradation control, and improved surgical handling, optimizing their functionality in dynamic wound environments. This review outlines current approaches to skin tissue engineering, examining the biomaterials employed in hydrogel design, their limitations, and their interactions with host tissues. Furthermore, it highlights the emerging potential of functionalized injectable hydrogels, particularly those engineered for controlled drug release, enhanced bioactivity, and patient-specific therapeutic applications. These hydrogels offer a transformative platform for advanced wound care and regenerative medicine.
Keywords: injectable hydrogels, Wound Healing, Polymers, Extracellular Matrix, Biomaterials, chronic wounds
Received: 25 Jun 2024; Accepted: 11 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Sawadkar, Lali, Garcia, Chaudhry, Matharu, Kyriakidis and Greco. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Karin Greco, University College London, London, United Kingdom
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.