Research Projects

Diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs) present a substantial challenge to the healthcare system. For instance, chronic deep cavity wounds having irregular sizes and shapes penetrate deeply into the body, affecting multiple layers of tissues, including muscles, tendons, and sometimes bones. While the current clinical management helps control infection, alleviate pressure, and provide a moist environment for healing, they often fall short for chronic wounds, where healing is complicated by factors like depth, volume, irregular shape, and persistent biofilms. Toward this, we envision developing a piezoelectric biopolymer composite (BPC) Bioink, comprising a cocktail of biopolymers (cellulose, collagen and elastin) and primary cell lines (co-culture of macrophages and fibroblasts) mimicking an adult human skin composition, to create wound-specific skin-grafts via 3D bioprinting for the treatment of deep cavity and irregularly shaped chronic wounds. Elastin provides structural integrity, while natural polysaccharides mimic 3D interconnected porous networks of skin. Macrophages and fibroblasts present in the BPC Bioink will be isolated from the patient’s wound bed, to provide a biomimetic environment and personalized treatment. BPC scaffolds will be designed by individually scanning the DFUs using sMRI and applying an image processing algorithm to reconstruct 3D geometry. In addition, cellulose exhibits piezoelectricity, meaning, capable of generating localized electric fields upon mechanical deformation. Therefore, through this project, we will exploit the electrically excitable nature of both immune cells and fibroblasts by introducing piezoelectric BPC scaffolds that generate electric fields under ultrasound stimulation and are expected to promote bactericidal response, fibroblast proliferation and migration, immune polarization (M1 to M2 phenotype) to accelerate wound healing. In vivo studies (diabetic mouse model) will be conducted at IIT Madras central animal facility after discussion with our clinical advisor Dr. S. Srikant (letter is enclosed) from Samatvam Endocrinology Diabetes Center, Karnataka. Overall, there are three main advantages of the proposed work, a) the formulation of BPC Bioink closely mimics that of natural adult human skin composition, b) personalized treatment; wound specific scaffold will be constructed upon imaging individual wounds and two major cells will be isolated from the wound bed to develop scaffold, and c) piezoelectric property of cellulose will enable the transformation of ultrasound stimulation into electrical cues to trigger series of cellular events to accelerate wound healing process. The proposed next-generation BPC Bioink with enhanced therapeutic response can effectively treat DFU within 21 days, which if left untreated takes more than six months. Upon project completion, the technology will be transferred to Next Big Innovation Lab Pvt. Ltd. for large-scale preparation and commercialization upon mandatory approvals.