The skin is the primary barrier against physical injury and microbial invasion. When this barrier is disrupted, effective wound management is essential to preserve tissue integrity and prevent complications. Traditional wound dressings provide basic protection but frequently fail to address the complex, dynamic requirements that arise across different stages of healing. Because of their highly hydrated three-dimensional networks, tunable physicochemical properties, and favorable biocompatibility, hydrogels have emerged as promising platforms for advanced skin wound care.
Skin repair is a multistage biological process involving hemostasis, inflammation, proliferation (including angiogenesis and tissue formation), and remodeling. Effective wound management requires interventions that can support or modulate these stages—controlling bleeding, preventing or treating infection, regulating immune responses and oxidative stress, promoting vascular ingrowth, and limiting excessive scarring. The review emphasizes the importance of matching hydrogel functions to the temporal needs of each healing phase to facilitate coordinated tissue regeneration.
Hydrogels used for wound dressings derive from diverse material classes. The review categorizes hydrogels according to their constituent polymers and composite components, reflecting differences in source (natural versus synthetic), mechanical behavior, degradability, and functionalizability. This material classification underpins selection for specific therapeutic objectives such as antimicrobial loading, hemostatic performance, or delivery of bioactive agents.
Fabrication approaches and crosslinking methods determine hydrogel network structure, mechanical properties, swelling behavior, and release kinetics for loaded therapeutics. The review summarizes commonly used crosslinking strategies and fabrication techniques that enable tuning of physicochemical characteristics. These methods allow design of hydrogels with target stiffness, porosity, degradability, and responsiveness to environmental cues, which are critical for matching dressing properties to wound type and healing stage.
Recent materials engineering advances have enabled hydrogels to integrate multiple therapeutic modalities within a single dressing. Multifunctional designs reported include combinations that provide hemostasis, antibacterial activity, immunomodulatory effects, antioxidant capacity, promotion of angiogenesis, scar mitigation, and controlled drug delivery. Such integration aims to address several pathological features of wounds simultaneously, for example combining infection control with pro-regenerative cues.
The review pays particular attention to the relationship between specific hydrogel functions and the different stages of wound healing. For example, rapid hemostasis and antimicrobial protection are most relevant immediately after injury; immunomodulation and antioxidant regulation are important during the inflammatory phase; angiogenesis promotion and sustained delivery of growth factors support proliferation; and approaches to minimize fibrosis aid remodeling and scar reduction. Designing hydrogels with stage-appropriate functions or with stimulus-responsive behaviors can better support the temporal needs of tissue repair.
Hydrogels offer several advantages over conventional dressings: high water content conducive to moist wound healing, structural similarity to extracellular matrix, capacity for local therapeutic delivery, and tunable properties. However, the review also highlights limitations across systems, including challenges in achieving suitable mechanical strength, balancing degradability and persistence, ensuring consistent antimicrobial efficacy, and tailoring multifunctionality without compromising safety or manufacturability.
Key challenges for clinical translation are identified: optimization of mechanical properties to meet clinical handling and in vivo load, rigorous large-animal evaluation to bridge preclinical and clinical contexts, and standardization of manufacturing processes to support reproducibility and scale-up. The review discusses emerging strategies to address these hurdles, including stimulus-responsive hydrogels that react to local wound cues and programmable therapeutic systems that can deliver temporally controlled interventions. These directions aim to improve clinical feasibility and therapeutic precision for future wound management solutions.
Notes on source scope and reporting
All points in this summary derive from the cited review abstract and bibliographic information. Specific experimental details, quantitative outcomes, or individual material examples and study results were not reported in the provided source text and are therefore not included here.