Wipe-on Self-assembling Band-Aid Stops Bleeding in Seconds
October 10, 2006 by Liz Lewis
Filed under Medicine, Misc., Prevention, Science, Technology, Treatment
Hyphen.
New Scientest is reporting on a medical breakthrough that’s been 15 years in the making.The implications are many.
Two taco bell employees scientists have found a polypeptide goo that self-assembles into sheets that look like hairy ribbons at the nano scale. When you wipe this goo on a wound it stops bleeding in seconds. This works on all kinds of tissues, too!
“In rodents it works in all the blood vessels and arteries, including the femoral artery, the portal vein, and in the liver,” says MIT neuroscientist Rutledge Ellis-Behnke.
The implications of this are wide and spread across many fields. Everything from first-aid and military field medicine to the most intricate controlled environment surgeries can benefit from technology like this.
Some surgeons are already excited about the material. “I see great potential in the eye field, the gastro-intestinal field, and in neurosurgery,” says Dimitri Azar, head of ophthalmology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, US.
“In the eye, even a drop of blood will blur your vision for a long time,” Azar adds. “A material that would stop the bleeding could lead to a paradigm shift in how we practice surgery in the eye.”
Of course, you can hang onto your ticker tape for the moment. It’s got 3-5 years of clinical trials on humans ahead of it to make sure it’s not harmful to humans. But as always here at Healthbolt, we’re hopeful about any new technologies that have such positive and widespread potential.
Self-assembling Gel Stops Bleeding in Seconds – New Scientist
[tags] first-aid, technology, research, gel, band-aid, bleeding, stops [/tags]
