FIGURE 1.

Design considerations of polysaccharide-based hydrogel wound dressings. (A) Schematic diagram of the two main cross-linking methods of polysaccharide-based hydrogels, namely physical and chemical cross-linking (Zhang and Khademhosseini, 2017) (B) The physicochemical properties that should be considered in the design of hydrogel wound dressings include but are not limited to mechanical properties (Chen et al., 2018), rheological properties (Zhao et al., 2020), biocompatibility (Zeng et al., 2015) and swelling properties (Zhu et al., 2019). (C) The unique biological properties of the polysaccharide-based hydrogel enable it to manage wounds; Firstly, they can serve as a drug delivery system to deliver antibacterial agents, growth factors, stem cells and so on. Secondly, polysaccharide molecules are the main components of the extracellular matrix (ECM) (Bystroňová et al., 2018). When designing wound dressing, they can be compounded with proteins to form glycoproteins to provide cells in the wound with a microenvironment similar to the ECM. In addition, polysaccharide molecules themselves can participate in the immune modulation process in the body, so designing a hydrogel with an appropriate degradation rate can promote wound healing from the perspective of immune regulation (Schepetkin & Quinn, 2006; Shah et al., 2021).