Surgical suture braided with a diclofenac-loaded strand of poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) for local, sustained pain mitigation

•Surgical suture assembled with a drug-delivery polymer strand is proposed.•Drug is released from the suture in a sustained manner.•The mechanical strength needed for wound closure is retained.•Drug-delivery suture can mitigate the pain in pain-induced animal models.

In this work, we propose a surgical suture that can sustainably release diclofenac (DF) for the local pain relief of surgical wounds. We separately fabricated a DF-loaded strand composed of a biodegradable polymer, poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA), which was then braided with a surgical suture already in clinical use, i.e., VICRYL™. In this way, the drug-delivery suture presented herein could release DF in a sustained manner for 10 days while maintaining the mechanical strength needed for wound closure. According to the in vivo results of an induced-pain animal model, the drug-delivery suture mitigated pain throughout the period of persistent pain. The histological analysis of tissue around the sutures showed that the drug-delivery suture exhibited biocompatibility comparable to that of the VICRYL™ suture in clinical use.