Chemical crosslinking and biophysical properties of electrospun hyaluronic acid based ultra-thin fibrous membranes

Hyaluronic acid (HA) ultra-thin fibrous membranes by electrospinning technology had been fabricated successfully by our group. However, these HA fibrous membranes dissolve and decompose rapidly in water. In this study, chemical crosslinking of HA and HA based ultra-thin fibrous membranes was studied in detail. It was found that the chemically crosslinked pure HA ultra-thin fibrous membranes with 1-ethyl -3-(3-dimethylaminopropyl) carbodiimide hydrochloride (EDC) as the crosslinking agent did not show an obvious improvement in the water-resistance. However, by simply adding and changing the gelatin content, the degradation time of the HA based fibrous membranes could be effectively adjusted from one week to several months. That is with the increase in gelatin content, the water-resistance of the HA/gelatin bi-component membranes could be increased greatly. The crosslinked HA/gelatin bicomponent membranes were evaluated in vitro by seeding with mouse embryonic fibroblasts (3T6-Swiss Albino). The results showed that the HA/gelatin fibrous membranes were cytocompatible and suitable for cell viability. However, cells were hard to attach and grow on the HA based membranes. Thus, the HA/gelatin fibrous membranes with controllable degradation rate could have good potential applications in the anti-adhesion and wound dressing fields. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.