Antibiotics & Antibiotic Resistance

Introduction: One of the most popular topical wound treatment is dressing. It can protect wound against the outer environment while preserves a moist wound environment to the wound. Agarose is generally extracted from a natural product that is safe and compatible. Consequently, agarose has been used as a material in drug delivery application including the material in this study. For active ingredient in this dressing, sericin was chosen because sericin is proteins from silk cocoon that can activate fibroblast to promote collagen type I synthesis leading to wound healing promotion.  However, a technology for wound dressing production that is friendly to the environment and costeffectiveness is still limited. The freeze-thawing method is a clean and comfortable method that can process without a special machine. Moreover, it also enhances the physical properties of the wound dressing. Combined the freezethawing process with general wound dressing production may have a good effect on dressing’s mechanical and physical properties. Therefore, the purposes of this study were to fabricate and investigate the properties of agarose dressing containing sericin prepared using the freeze-thawing process combined with freeze-drying method comparing to the pure freeze-drying method.

Methodology: The physical and mechanical properties of the dressing were investigated using Scanning electron microscopy, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy and the gel fraction, swelling, releasing, and compressive properties were assessed.

Findings: The mechanical properties of the agarose containing sericin dressing prepared using the freezethawing process combined with the freeze-drying method were superior to those of using the pure freeze-drying method. Moreover, the physical properties of the dressing prepared using the freezethawing process combined with freeze-drying method tended to have better qualities than dressing prepared by pure freeze-drying method. The percentage of swelling of all samples were >90%. Conclusion: The agarose dressing containing sericin prepared using the freezethawing process combined with freeze-drying method seem to be better than pure freeze-drying method.