Recent advances in 3D printed wound dressings

Chronic and acute wounds interfere with personal aesthetics and appearance. Regarding the problematics, researchers enhance the functionalities of wound dressings. One of the enhancement approaches is using 3D printing technology. The use of 3D printing has enabled many types of wound dressings, including biodegradable multi-material, cell-laden, and drug-eluting wound dressings. The use of 3D printing even allows for a wound dressing with a 3D construct, facilitating the wound dressing placement at the wound bed. Unfortunately, the 3D printed wound dressing technology has never been reviewed, to the extent of our knowledge. In this report, we aim to reflect on the recent advances in 3D printed wound dressings. Reports regarding the 3D printed wound dressing were collected from the Google Scholar database. The search was limited from 2015 to 2020 with a logic search: “3D printed” AND “wound dressing,” which words can be found in the entire article. Irrelevant reports were excluded manually, thereby resulting in the 24 selected articles. The selected articles were subsequently reviewed in terms of the materials-efficacy analysis and 3D printing mechanism. The extracted information from all articles concluded that alginate is the most used material for 3D printed wound dressing, while the most used 3D printing mechanism is the pneumatic FDM. In terms of efficacy, wound dressings presented an antimicrobial performance against Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, as well as biocompatibility to epidermis and dermis cells.