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Daytime radiative cooling dressings for accelerating wound healing under sunlight

Nature Chemical Engineering volume 1, pages 301–310 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

The process of wound healing is sensitive to various factors of the local environment, including temperature, humidity and sterility. However, due to lack of efficient thermal regulation in existing wound dressings, the perturbed local environment and oxidative stress caused by an increased wound temperature under outdoor sunlight inevitably impacts wound healing. Here we demonstrate a daytime radiative cooling dressing based on a polyamide 6/silk fibroin bilayer that reduces the thermal load for skin wounds under sunlight illumination. The mid-infrared transparent polyamide 6 and the biocompatible silk fibroin together endow a high mid-infrared emissivity (~0.94) and sunlight reflectivity (~0.96), thus achieving a temperature of ~7 °C below ambient under direct sunlight. When used for repairing mouse skin full-thickness injuries under sunlight, we observed an accelerated wound healing rate compared with that of commercial dressings. This work therefore offers a promising strategy for passive temperature regulation to accelerate wound healing under sunlight.

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Fig. 1: Schematic of the structural design of DRC dressings for local wound environment management under sunlight and its working mechanism.
Fig. 2: The structures and physical properties of the DRC dressing.
Fig. 3: Radiative cooling performance measurements of the DRC dressings.
Fig. 4: Treatment evaluation of the DRC dressing for full-thickness injury under sunlight.
Fig. 5: RNA sequencing of wounds handled by DRC dressings.

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All data are available in the main text or Supplementary Information. Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the micro-fabrication center of National Laboratory of Solid-State Microstructures (NLSSM) for technique support. J.Z. acknowledges support from XPLORER PRIZE. B.Z. and J.Z. acknowledge support from the National Key Research and Development Program of China (grant nos. 2022YFA1404704, 2017YFA0205700). Q.Z., W.L., W.X., B.Z. and J.Z. acknowledge support from National Natural Science Foundation of China Programs (grant nos. 52372197, 51925204, 52002168, 52303323, 62134009, 62121005, U21A2095). B.Z. acknowledges support from the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20231540). B.Z. and J.Z. acknowledge support from Key Science and Technology Inovation Program of Shandong Province (grant no. 2019JZZY020704), Excellent Research Program of Nanjing University (grant no. ZYJH005), research foundation of Frontiers Science Center for Critical Earth Material Cycling (grant no. 14380214), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (grant nos. 021314380184, 021314380208, 021314380190, 021314380140, 021314380150). W.X. acknowledges support from the Key Research and Development Program of Hubei Province (grant nos. 2021BAA068, 2020DGC003). Q.Z. acknowledges support from Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province (grant no. 2023AFB265) and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (grant no. 2021M691488). C.Q. acknowledges support from Knowledge innovation special project of Wuhan Science and Technology Bureau (grant no. 2023020201010181) and ~2023–2024 Traditional Chinese Medicine Research Project of Hubei Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine (grant no. ZY2023Q018). Q.Z. and B.Z. acknowledge support from State Key Laboratory of New Textile Materials and Advanced Processing Technologies (Wuhan Textile University, grant nos. FZ2022011, FZ20230021).

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Qian Zhang, Chao Qi, Xueyang Wang.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Artificial Functional Materials, Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Frontiers Science Center for Critical Earth Material Cycling, Nanjing University, Nanjing, P. R. China

    Qian Zhang, Xueyang Wang, Bin Zhu, Hanyu Fu, Shining Zhu & Jia Zhu

  2. State Key Laboratory of New Textile Materials and Advanced Processing Technologies, Wuhan Textile University, Wuhan, P. R. China

    Qian Zhang, Xingfang Xiao & Weilin Xu

  3. Department of Pharmacy, Wuhan No.1 Hospital (Wuhan Hospital of Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine), Wuhan, P. R. China

    Chao Qi & Song Hu

  4. GPL Photonics Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Luminescence Science and Technology, Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun, P. R. China

    Wei Li

  5. School of Sustainable Energy and Resources, Nanjing University, Suzhou, P. R. China

    Jia Zhu

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Contributions

Q.Z., B.Z., and J.Z. conceived and planned this research. Q.Z. and X.W. performed the materials experiments. The biomedical and animal experiments were performed by collaborators of C.Q. and S.H.. W.L., X.X. and H.F. contributed to the optical modeling and thermal analysis. Q.Z., X.W., C.Q., B.Z., S.Z., W.X. and J.Z. organized the data and wrote the paper. All the authors discussed the results and approved the final version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Bin Zhu, Weilin Xu or Jia Zhu.

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Nature Chemical Engineering thanks Chi-Yan Tso and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 The measured (solid line) and simulated (dashed line) temperatures of the skin simulator covered with different dressings under direct sunlight.

The measured (solid line) and simulated (dashed line) temperatures of the skin simulator covered with different dressings under direct sunlight. The simulated parameters are as follows: the power of solar radiation is 1,069 W m–2, the ambient temperature is ~33.5 °C and the wind speed is ~2.8 m s–1.

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Zhang, Q., Qi, C., Wang, X. et al. Daytime radiative cooling dressings for accelerating wound healing under sunlight. Nat Chem Eng 1, 301–310 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44286-024-00050-4

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