Novel Physically-Crosslinked Caffeine and Vitamin C-Loaded PVA/Aloe Vera Hydrogel Membranes for Topical Wound Healing: Synthesis, Characterization and In-Vivo Wound Healing Tests

Novel physically-crosslinked PVA membranes blended with Aloe vera extract were fabricated by solution-casting method. Physically-crosslinking process is depending on the rearrangement of PVA chains forming intermolecular hydrogen bonding with removal of water molecules using propanol as a stabilizing agent. The structure of crosslinked membranes was characterized by FT-IR, SEM, TGA, and XRD analyses and confirmed via gel faction and swelling ratio studies. Caffeine and vitamin C loaded-PVA/Aloe vera membranes were bio-assessed in terms of their impact on the wound healing using Wistar albino rats as an animal model. In vitro evaluation includes protein adsorption showed that the fabricated membranes improved significantly the wound healing ability via enhancing the tissue platelet aggregation. In addition, resulting adequate in vitro release behavior for the loaded ingredients in the potential application. In-vivo results displayed that rats full-thickness wounds were remarkably reduced after PVA/Aloe vera/Vitamin C membranes treatment, as shown by a reduction in the area of the wounds when compared to wounds treated with cotton gauze and PVA/Aloe vera membranes. Furthermore, the treated wounds with PVA/Aloevera/caffeine show more wound closer comparing to that incorporate vitamin C and the PVA/Aloevera incorporated both caffeine and vitamin C give the most significant healing that show reappearance of hair covered the wound area. Histological examinations of wounds covered in membranes showed a successful re-epithelialization, demonstrating caffeine's and vitamin C's efficacy. These results demonstrated that, PVA/Aloe Vera/Caffeine and PVA/Aloe vera/vitamin C membrane have remarkable wound healing and skin regeneration properties.