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Bioinspired Bandage Reacts to Body Heat, Accelerates Healing

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The AAD contracts when it heats up to body temperature, allowing it to accelerate the healing of open wounds on the skin (via Wyss Institute at Harvard University)

Adhesive bandages protect wounds from bacteria, damage, and dirt. (And sometimes sport super hip designs.)

But they do little to assist in the actual healing process.

And more sophisticated wound dressings are often complex to manufacture, expensive, and difficult to customize.

Enter active adhesive dressings (AADs).

Researchers at Harvard and McGill universities developed a scalable approach to speeding up wound healing based on heat-responsive hydrogels that are mechanically active, stretchy, tough, highly adhesive, and antimicrobial.

In layman’s terms: AADs can close wounds and prevent bacterial growth faster and more efficiently than other options.

A paper describing the new method was published in the journal Science Advances.

“This technology has the potential to be used not only for skin injuries, but also for chronic wounds like diabetic ulcers and pressure sores, for drug delivery, and as components of soft robotics-based therapies,” study co-author and Harvard professor David Mooney said in a statement.

AADs are inspired by embryos, whose skin can heal itself completely without forming scar tissue—an ability lost once a fetus develops past a certain age.

The active adhesive dressing could be used to close wounds on internal tissues such as the heart, deliver drugs, and function in soft robotics-based therapies (via Wyss Institute at Harvard University)

To mimic those protein fibers that pull embryonic wound edges together like a drawstring bag being closed, researchers updated previously developed tough adhesive hydrogels.

The resulting hybrid system contracts when it heats up to body temperature, allowing it to accelerate the healing of open lacerations on the skin.

“The AAD bonded to pig skin with over 10 times the adhesive force of a Band-Aid and prevented bacteria from growing,” project leader Benjamin Freedman, a postdoctoral fellow in the Mooney lab, said in a statement. “So this technology is already significantly better than most commonly used wound protection products, even before considering its wound-closing properties.”

Testing their active adhesive dressings on patches of mouse skin, researchers found AADs reduced the size of the wound area by about 45 percent compared to almost no change in untreated samples, and closed wounds faster than other treatments.

Plus, it didn’t cause inflammation or immune responses, suggesting the technology is probably safe for use in and on living tissues.

Moving forward, Mooney & Co. hope to learn more about how AADs impact the biological process of wound healing, as well as how they perform across a range of climates, since body temperatures can vary at different locations.

“We hope to pursue additional preclinical studies to demonstrate AAD’s potential as a medical product, and then work toward commercialization,” Freedman said.

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