Recent advances in formulating electrospun nanofiber membranes: Delivering active phytoconstituents

Extracts derived from plant origin have been used in clinical practice for the management of burn injuries, wounds and different medical ailments, dating back many centuries. In current modern practice, the application of plant-based extracts has been extended to repair and/or regenerate soft to hard tissues using nanotechnology. Lately, the evolution of polymeric scaffolds by electrospinning technique has expanded the scope of plant-based extract in exploitation to various biomedical fields. In this work, an exhaustive literature survey was conducted out by means of scientific engines and databases such as Google Scholar, PubMed, ScienceDirect and MEDLINE. The articles published between 1933 and 2018 were included in this study to investigate the applicability of plant-based extracts using nanofibers as keywords. This review recapitulates the implementation and recent advances of plant extract incorporated in nanofibers for the domains of tissue engineering, drug delivery and wound healing. Furthermore, these scaffolds provide a high degree of porosity ensuing in the large surface area accessible for cell attachment and infiltration, gaseous/waste exchange and nutrient mobilization. These scaffolds also represent as mats to assist as skin graft replacement for proper application of the affected areas at burn sites. These scaffolds provide innovative means of encapsulating the phytoconstituents and additional options to synthetic replicas used in wound management and drug delivery. However, novel strategies need to be endorsed for large-scale generation of the fibers and succeeding in clinical translation of these outcomes.