Open Access Conference Proceedings

For burns and necrotic wounds, removal of the necrotic tissue is the first step to successful treatment. Effective wound cleansing and debridement are essential for granulation and re-epithalisation. Now it is possible to replace a current very painful surgical removal with the enzymatic or autolytic debridement. Especially enzymatic debridement is a highly selective method that utilizes naturally occurring proteolytic enzymes. The reasons why the surgical removal has not yet been replaced by painless enzymatic debridement are low enzyme stability and many factors affecting enzymes activity (type of substrate, pH, temperature, etc.).The possibility to solve this problem is the enzyme immobilization on the suitable material – e.g. nanofibers with a lot of functional groups for covalent binding of the enzymes. As a supporting biocompatible and biodegradable material for immobilization of several enzymes types, the electrospun silica nanofibers were chosen. Proteolytic activity of immobilized enzymes was tested under different conditions.

Keywords: Silica nanofibers, proteolytic enzymes, burns, immobilization

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