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Smart electronic bandage may heal chronic wounds

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A new smart bandage may change our wound caring practices.
Researchers have designed a “smart” bandage that is much more effective and faster-acting than regular healing patches. The same device can also be loaded with drugs, depending on the type and stage of the wound it is applied to.

The idea for the new device was born out of the need to find more efficient, expedient, and cost-effective treatments for chronic wounds.

Chronic wounds – including venous ulcers, diabetic ulcers, and pressure ulcers – are particularly challenging to treat due to the complex biological mechanism that characterizes them.

They do not heal after the standard 4 weeks of care, largely because the body does not release the compounds that are essential to healing in a timely fashion.

But the new device may change this. Being able to administer different drugs at different stages in the progression of the wound is known to help with chronic wounds, and the smart bandage allows medical professionals to do just that using one single device.

The smart healing patch was engineered by researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) in collaboration with scientists from Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA.

In the new study – which is published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials – the team details a series of experiments that they ran in order to test the benefits of their innovation.

One of the corresponding authors of the study is Ali Tamayol, an assistant professor of mechanical and materials engineering at UNL. “The medical cost associated with [chronic] wounds is tremendous,” he says. “So there is a big need to find solutions for [them].”

How the smart bandage works

The smart healing patch is the size of a postage stamp, made up of electrically conductive fibers, and can be controlled remotely with a smartphone or another wireless or bluetooth device.

The fibers are coated with a water-based gel that can be loaded with various drugs, depending on the needs of the wound.
Antibiotics, so-called growth factors that help the tissue to regenerate, and painkillers could all be alternatively administered using the same “e-bandage,” all the while controlling remotely not only the substance, but also the dosage.

In one of the experiments detailed in the study, the researchers applied the e-bandage loaded with a tissue-growth factor to wounded mice, and a normal “dry” bandage to a control group of mice.

The experiment showed that the smart bandage helped the mice to regrow three times as much tissue than the control group did. Tissue regeneration is a key step in the healing process.

In another experiment, the team loaded the bandage with an antibiotic. The smart healing patch successfully fought off the infection.

“This is the first bandage that is capable of dose-dependent drug release […] You can release multiple drugs with different release profiles. That’s a big advantage in comparison with other systems.” Prof. Ali Tamayol
“What we did here,” he continues, “was come up with a strategy for building a bandage from the bottom up […] This is a platform that can be applied to many different areas of biomedical engineering and medicine.”

“Imagine that you have a variable patch that has antidotes or drugs targeted toward specific hazards in the environment,” Tamayol adds.

The researchers also hope that the first application of their device will be to heal the chronic ulcers that result from diabetes.

The majority of the bandage’s components have already been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the researchers say. But before bringing the device to market, the bandage will still have to be tested in animals and then in human trials.

Until then, the team is hard at work trying to make the bandage capable of administering the appropriate treatments autonomously.

Source: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/319678.php

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Now, there’s an injectable bandage that can heal internal injuries

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An injectable bandage fabricated from a seaweed-derived gel that is used in cooking can stop internal bleeding and promote wound healing, according to researchers of Indian origin in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Texas A&M University.

This self-administering injectable gel can prevent death from excessive blood loss from road traffic accidents, internal bleeding and shrapnel injury, they claim. Researchers used kappa-carrageenan found in seaweed to design injectable hydrogels, which are jelly-like 3-D water swollen polymer networks that simulate the structure of human tissues. Mixing this hydrogel with clay-based nanoparticles produced an injectable gelatin that led to plasma protein and platelets to form blood adsorption on the gel surface to accelerate clotting.

“These biomaterials can be introduced into a wound site using minimally invasive approaches to promote a natural clotting cascade and initiate wound healing response after hemostasis (the process to stop bleeding),” said Dr Akhilesh K. Gaharwar, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University. The study is published in the journal Acta Biomateriali.

Innovators are calling it a remarkable addition to the achievements in nanotechnology. “Many people die in road accidents due to internal bleeding from lack of timely medical aid, this innovation will help address the lacunae,” said Manish Goel, CEO, i3 Nanotec LLC & ICube Nanotec India.

“A more conducive environment for academia-industry partnerships and incubation space for young scientists will undoubtedly foster such and many more innovations. It is disheartening to see so many young researchers migrate to IT and finance, when nanotechnology has the potential of being lucrative while contributing to the society,“ he said.

These injectable bandages are also conducive to prolonged release of medicines used to heal wounds.

Source: https://www.hindustantimes.com/health/now-there-s-an-injectable-bandage-that-can-heal-fatal-internal-injuries/story-ukF9KLgUc4en5gVpz052FK.html

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Your deep wounds can be healed within minutes by a portable 3D skin printer

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In a first, researchers have developed a portable 3D skin printer that deposits even layers of tissue to cover and heal deep wounds within minutes.

For patients with deep skin wounds, all three skin layers – the epidermis, dermis and hypodermis – may be heavily damaged.

The current preferred treatment is called split-thickness skin grafting, where healthy donor skin is grafted onto the surface epidermis and part of the underlying dermis.

Split-thickness grafting on large wounds requires enough healthy donor skin to traverse all three layers, and sufficient graft skin is rarely available. This leaves a portion of the wounded area ‘ungrafted’ or uncovered, leading to poor healing outcomes.

Although a large number of tissue-engineered skin substitutes exist, they are not yet widely used in clinical settings.

“Most current 3D bioprinters are bulky, work at low speeds, are expensive and are incompatible with clinical application,” said Axel Guenther from University of Toronto in Canada.

The team believes their in-situ skin printer is a platform technology that can overcome these barriers, while improving the skin-healing process – a major step forward.

The handheld skin printer resembles a white-out tape dispenser – except the tape roll is replaced by a microdevice that forms tissue sheets.

Vertical stripes of ‘bio ink,’ made up of protein-based biomaterials including collagen, the most abundant protein in the dermis, and fibrin, a protein involved in wound healing, run along the inside of each tissue sheet.

“Our skin printer promises to tailor tissues to specific patients and wound characteristics. And it’s very portable,” said Navid Hakimi, PhD student at University of Toronto.

The handheld device is the size of a small shoe box and weighs less than a kilogramme. It also requires minimal operator training and eliminates the washing and incubation stages required by many conventional bioprinters.

The researchers plan to add several capabilities to the printer, including expanding the size of the coverable wound areas. Working with Jeschke’s team at Sunnybrook Hospital, they plan to perform more in vivo studies.

They hope that one day they can begin running clinical trials on humans, and eventually revolutionise burn care.

Source: https://www.hindustantimes.com/health/your-deep-wounds-can-be-healed-within-minutes-by-a-portable-3d-skin-printer/story-DJcocV6bjCWmMMKySY5MyN.html

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