Medical dressing works like duct tape to seal inner wounds

Wounds within the intestine may cause harmful infections, however a sticky medical dressing can patch them up and permit them to heal

Duct tape inspired bandage

A duct tape-inspired bandage bioadhesive patch

Xuanhe Zhao et al.

A clear dressing impressed by duct tape has been proven to shortly heal inner accidents in rats.

Leaks after gastrointestinal surgical procedure may cause harmful infections, affecting thousands and thousands of individuals every year. Surgeons sometimes use stitches to assist heal wounds, however these can kind imperfect seals and heal abnormally, permitting micro organism from the intestine to flee into close by tissues.

Now, Xuanhe Zhao on the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how and his colleagues have designed a clear, degradable dressing that helps intestine wounds heal extra successfully and shortly in rats and pigs, with out leaking micro organism.

Whereas adhesive wound dressings are widespread on pores and skin, the moist environments contained in the physique are a trickier place to use them. Zhao and his colleagues designed their dressing to work like duct tape, which is just sticky on one facet. As soon as it covers the wound, it shortly kinds a hydrogel, an adhesive layer that may assist the wound to heal. The dressing is versatile too, so it will probably work on wounds with an advanced floor topology.

“The magic is that right here you might have one thing that's designed to work in these moist environments, however on the identical time has these tissue-conformant options,” says Christoph Nabzdyk on the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who helped take a look at the patch in animals.

The dressing additionally spreads out stress across the wound, which is necessary as some wounds are weak for a number of days earlier than they ultimately heal.

Whereas the usage of hydrogels in wound patches isn’t unusual, the mixture of the moist adhesive floor and a dry higher layer, in addition to its flexibility, is novel, says Nuria Oliva-Jorge at Imperial Faculty London.

“Till now, we had been utilizing principally sutures and staples as a result of there have been no good adhesives that might match the properties of the intestine,” says Oliva-Jorge. “And so they’ve made it with this twin patch.”

Zhao and his colleagues at the moment are trying to develop the patch to be used in people, and have based an organization, SanaHeal, to take action – although controlling irritation and scar tissue formation can be essential for displaying the patch is a protected various to present sutures.

Journal reference: Science Translational Drugs, DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.abh2857

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