Individual Human Hair Keratin Rapidly Extracted Through the Advanced Oxidation Process and Their Hemostatic and Wound Healing Evaluations

Autogenous keratin is a promising material for personalized wound healing applications. However, the common keratin extraction methods are time-consuming, and the variations in performance between different individual keratins are not clear. Herein, we developed TiO 2 photocatalytic-assisted H 2 O 2 oxidation strategy (H 2 O 2 /TiO 2 /UV), an advanced oxidation method, to rapidly extract human hair keratins within 2 h. The H 2 O 2 /TiO 2 /UV method for keratin extraction showed a higher protein yield compared to the H 2 O 2 method. Keratins obtained from the developed method exhibited typical chemical and secondary structures. Furthermore, individual keratins from four young girls were extracted by using the H 2 O 2 /TiO 2 /UV method, and individual keratin/PCL films were successfully fabricated within 5 h. More importantly, individual keratin films displayed superior hemostatic performance and wound healing in vivo compared to that of keratin extracted via the H 2 O 2 method. Interestingly, the four individual keratin films exhibited similar hemostatic efficiency but distinct wound-healing properties in terms of epidermal thickness and density of skin appendages. These data indicated that the developed H 2 O 2 /TiO 2 /UV method is an efficient and feasible approach to extract human hair keratins, which provides an intriguing possibility to explore personalized materials for promoting wound healing.