Emerging Functional Biomaterials as Medical Patches

TLDR

Medical patches have been widely explored in wound healing, tissue engineering, and other biomedical areas, and recent advances in biomaterials and manufacturing have turned them into multifunctional devices attracting extensive research interest. The paper reviews emerging functional biomaterials for medical patches, focusing on their biomedical applications such as wound healing, drug delivery, and real‑time health monitoring. The review summarizes approaches to fabricate patches with micro‑ and nanoarchitecture and discusses their biomedical applications. The review highlights challenges and future prospects for medical patch development.

Abstract

Medical patches have been widely explored and applied in various medical fields, especially in wound healing, tissue engineering, and other biomedical areas. Benefiting from emerging biomaterials and advanced manufacturing technologies, great achievements have been made on medical patches to evolve them into a multifunctional medical device for diverse health-care purposes, thus attracting extensive attention and research interest. Here, we provide up-to-date research concerning emerging functional biomaterials as medical patches. An overview of the various approaches to construct patches with micro- and nanoarchitecture is presented and summarized. We then focus on the applications, especially the biomedical applications, of the medical patches, including wound healing, drug delivery, and real-time health monitoring. The challenges and prospects for the future development of the medical patches are also discussed.