Smart Medical Dressing Offers Bespoke Healing
Researchers at Imperial College London have developed a smart medical dressing that uses aptamer constructs to deliver endogenous growth factors to wounds. This technology promotes faster healing by selectively concentrating the body's own repair substances at the site of injury.
Why it matters
This innovation could significantly improve treatment outcomes for chronic, non-healing wounds like diabetic ulcers, reducing the need for invasive clinical interventions.
A medical dressing that can harness the body’s own repair system to deliver growth factors could transform wound care, providing faster and more accessible healing.
The invention shows how high-tech materials can deliver biological substances made by the body according to the needs of injured tissue.
The dressing, outlined in Nature Materials , is an advancement on regular dressings that structurally support the wound but do not offer personalized healing benefits.
It is able to use far lower doses of growth factors than those traditionally found in wound-healing sprays and creams, with the added advantage that these are endogenous and more likely to reach sites where they are most needed.
“What excites me most is that this works in living human skin,” said lead researcher Magdalene Ho, PhD, from Imperial College London.
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