A wounded soldier struggles to stop his bleeding while fighting off rebel gunfire. A lone hiker must tend his own injuries after falling into a deep crevice in the mountains.
A cutting-edge wound dressing developed by a University of Rhode Island professor and the president and founder of an Ashland, Mass.-based biomedical company, which promotes clotting in wounds, could provide needed medical care for soldiers and hikers, as well as public safety and emergency medical personnel.
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Martin Bide, professor of textiles, fashion merchandising and design at URI, and Matthew Phaneuf, president of BioSurfaces, have been collaborating on biomedical endeavors for almost 15 years, on materials for artificial arteries and other biomaterials for medical use. The wound dressing they have developed is made of a polyester material covered with a protein that enhances and speeds blood-clotting. The pair has applied for a patent for their dressing.
According to the technology disclosure for the provisional patent, in 2002 more than 400,000 trauma cases were reported in the United States, with more than one-third of them fatal. Approximately 40 percent of the deaths were attributed to uncontrolled bleeding.
Bide and Phaneuf had been working on other biomedical projects, and started brainstorming when they learned of a contract bid from the Department of Defense for improvements in first aid. While they did not win the contract, the pair decided to reverse some of the anti-coagulant work they had been doing for artificial arteries to make a wound dressing.
According to Bide, the two have done work with the U.S. Army in the past, and at the suggestion of Army personnel, Bide and Phaneuf decided to watch a movie.
“They said that there were problems with extracting injured soldiers, and to get an idea, they told us to watch the movie ‘Black Hawk Down,’” based on the military conflict and subsequent rescue effort in Somalia in 1993, Phaneuf said. “The technology the military has is very basic; they basically use two different bandages.”
One bandage uses crushed shellfish as a blood-clotting agent, but in order to help clot the blood, one must still put pressure on the wound. Another type of dressing calls for pouring a blood-clotting powder into the wound, but the powder produces a highly exothermic reaction. As a result, many have received second- and third-degree burns, Phaneuf said.
“It looks like a regular piece of polyester, and it’s dyed with an antibiotic and then we do chemical attachments of the protein,” Bide said. As for the potential to market and sell the dressings in different sizes, he said, “Someone could potentially make a piece that suits them.”
The polyester material, which also has polyurethane in it, is inlayed into the dressing to give it elasticity. The material is chemically treated to receive the proteins, and then the antibiotic Cipro is incorporated into the material by way of textile dyeing. The biologically active agent thrombin is then added, an enzyme in the clotting process.
“The specific protein thrombin kicks off the body’s clotting mechanism and while that is working, the antibiotic is moving into the wound to prevent infection,” Phaneuf said. The dressing would eliminate the need for applying pressure to the wound, as well as clotting and antibiotic medications.
