Fabrication of ulvan based structure for skin tissue engineering and wound healing application

Skin tissue engineering has made tremendous progress in producing skin substitutes for clinical grafting. Recently, three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting has been increasingly employed to fabricate living skin constructs with 3D spatial precision and microenvironmental architecture. However, this is hitting a bottleneck due to a paucity of functional materials and bioinks that are both biocompatible, functional and printable. An array of biological properties is demonstrated in the category of extracts broadly known as ulvans, including antibacterial, anti-inflammatory and anti-coagulant activities. Ulvans are sulfated polysaccharides derived from green algae, and structurally resemble mammalian connective glycosaminoglycans such as dermatan sulfate and chondroitin sulfate. It is therefore a strong candidate for applications in wound healing and tissue regeneration. However, the development of ulvans in biomedical applications is limited due to high structural variability across species and a lack of consistent and scalable sources. In addition, the modification and formulation of these molecules is still in its infancy with regard to progressing to product development. The present work investigates a rhamnose-rich ulvan polysaccharide, ulvan-84 (Ul84) obtained from a controlled source of a cultivated, DNA-barcoded species of Australian Ulvacean macroalgae, to reveal the potentials in skin tissue engineering and wound healing application.