Abstract
Disruption of the reparative process, often found in diabetic patients, results in chronic, non-healing wounds that significantly impact a patient's quality of life. This highlights the need of new therapeutic options to improve the healing of diabetic wounds. In this study, we focused on developing a cell-free hydrogel dressing loaded with mesenchymal stem cell (MSC)-conditioned media (CM) to potentially improve the healing of hard-to-heal wounds. We simulated a hyperglycemic environment by incubating human dermal fibroblasts in a high glucose environment (30 mM) and validated that MSC-CM rescued the impaired functions (proliferation and migration) of hyperglycemic fibroblasts. Further, we investigated the effect of loading MSC-CM in gelatin methacrylate (GelMA)-poly (ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEGDA) hybrid hydrogels in improving the proliferative activity of glucose-treated fibroblasts. The controlled release of bioactive factors from MSC-CM loaded GelMA-PEGDA hydrogels promoted the metabolic activity of hyperglycemic fibroblasts. In addition, the growth rate of hyperglycemic fibroblasts was found to be similar to that of normal fibroblasts. Our observations, thus, suggest the potential application of cell-free, MSC-secretome-loaded hydrogel in the healing of diabetic or chronic wounds.