Groundbreaking antimicrobial dressing ensures rapid bleeding control in the event of an accident

Without appropriate medical inventions, injuries caused by traffic accidents, serious work accidents or weapons can lead to fatal bleeding.

Researchers at the University of Central Florida want to prevent such bleeding in potentially fatal situations with a new hemostatic, sponge-like dressing with antimicrobial activity that they recently developed and detailed in a newly published study in the journal Biomaterials Science.

What happens in the field or in an accident is due to excessive bleeding, patients can die. These deaths usually occur in the first 30 minutes to an hour. Our whole idea was to develop a very simple solution that can achieve hemostatic effectiveness within this time. If you can save the patient, the doctors and nurses can also save the patient.

Kausik Mukhopadhyay, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at UCF and co-author of the study

Chemistry and mechanisms

The method developed by Mukhopadhyay and his team is called SilFoam because it involves a foam rather than a traditional bandage wrap. SilFoam is a liquid gel made of siloxanes (silicon and oxygen) administered via a special dual-chamber syringe that quickly expands into a spongy foam in less than a minute when they meet in the wound. The sponge applies pressure to limit bleeding at the delivery site and doubles as an antibacterial agent due to the silver oxide it contains.

For every five milliliters of gel injected, you can expect an expansion of about 35 milliliters, says Mukhopadhyay.

“Any time you have a bad bleed or bleed, you want to press on it and stop the bleeding,” he says. “So what we did here is actually the same thing. Instead of putting the hand in, we injected it and it creates a voluminous expansion.”

Mukhopadhyay and his collaborators found that their sponge also resulted in smoother removal.

“The adhesive properties of this bandage are optimized so that the smaller vessels do not burst when removed from the system, but it has the right amount of additive that can adhere to the muscles, veins and arteries so that the blood does not flow “, he says.

The sponge’s porosity and adhesive properties help it expand and seal the wound, allowing the body’s natural clotting process to take over, says Mukhopadhyay.

“During the reaction, a small amount of heat is generated, which greatly speeds up the process,” he says. “In addition, oxygen gas is trying to come out as part of the byproduct of the reaction. So instead of making it a cross-linkable rubber, it’s a soft sponge with a lot of internal porosity.”

Experiments and methods

Researching ways to treat wounds requires special care and consideration to ensure that no harm is caused to the subjects. However, the researchers were able to get around this by using a functional anatomical model to test their methods.

They used custom-made mannequins with realistic blood vessels and wounds developed by a local company called SIMETRI to test their foam, hoping that the preliminary results were promising enough to move forward with further testing.

“One of the most important aspects of this was that we used non-invasive models,” says Mukhopadhyay. “At this stage we can obtain approvals and continue studying the in vivo models. There is also no psychological impact on veterinarians or surgeons at this stage.”

The experiments proved promising, especially when researchers compared SilFoam to five other existing treatments.

They found that SilFoam had many benefits such as: B. significantly less leaks, storage at room temperature compared to cold temperatures, ultimately lower material costs and little to no training requirements to use the syringe.

Pritha Sarkar, a graduate student in the materials science department at UCF, helped with the experiments.

“We had to check the reactivity of the two parts because we wanted enough oxygen gas to expand the sponge, but at the same time we didn’t want the material to get too hot because the reaction itself generates heat,” she says.

Sarkar also emphasized the toxicity and strength of the materials to ensure that they are safe and durable for the human body but not too stiff.

She also ensured that the composition of the SilFoam would not cause any harm to the patient during removal.

“If you have something that is very sticky, like a bandage, that you can put on your wound, that will stop blood from coming out. However, if you want to remove this bandage, it may cause tissue damage or pain,” says Sarkar. “Our polymer system does not stick to your skin and is therefore very easy to remove. We have a bandage that expands to your wound and closes it, but at the same time you can remove it once it has done its job very easily.”

Reducing infections and next steps

The antibacterial component of the research was conducted by Melanie Coathup, a professor at the UCF College of Medicine and director of the Biionix cluster at UCF.

She works with materials scientists and mechanical engineers to develop new medical technologies and therapies.

“My postdoctoral fellow Dr. Abi Sindu Pugazhendhi and I, together with Dr. “Mukhopadhyay and his team studied the effectiveness of their material and how well it stopped bacterial growth,” says Coathup. “We studied bacteria that would typically infect a traumatic injury to the trunk and our results showed that the material was highly effective and therefore this material was used in Dr. “The dressing system developed by Mukhopadhyay and confirmed its effectiveness as a novel hemostatic and antibacterial strategy.” is a great and important find.”

She says the opportunity to save lives through this research has been extremely rewarding.

“The research is significant because there are currently no effective treatments for treating people with these conditions and really new strategies are needed,” says Coathup. “This means that working with Dr.

Mukhopadhyay also recently received a GAP award for his assistance with the licensing and deployment of SilFoam. He says the next step is to work with the University of Nebraska Medical Center and conduct in vivo studies at their facilities.