Posted on 08/31/2021 10:40:14 AM PDT by Red Badger
Engineers have designed a strong, biocompatible glue that can seal injured tissues and stop bleeding, inspired by the sticky substance that barnacles use to cling to rocks. Credit: Stock Photo
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Mayo Clinic researchers and colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a rapid-sealing paste that can stop bleeding organs independent of clotting. The details are published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
The inspiration for this paste? Barnacles.
Barnacles are those sea animals that adhere to rocks, the bottom of ships and large fish with the aim of staying in place despite wet conditions and variable surfaces. They’re successful because they exude a type of oil matrix that cleans the surface and repels moisture. Then they follow up with a protein that cross-links them with the molecules of the surface. That two-step process is what happens when the sealing paste is applied to organs or tissues.
Historically, surgeons would use a type of material that would speed up coagulation and form a clot to stop the bleeding. In the fastest cases, that would still take several minutes. In preclinical studies, this research team has shown the paste to stop bleeding in as little as 15 seconds, even before clotting has begun.
“Our data show how the paste achieves rapid hemostasis in a coagulation-independent fashion. The resulting tissue seal can withstand even high arterial pressures,” says Christoph Nabzdyk, M.D., a Mayo Clinic cardiac anesthesiologist and critical care physician. “We think the paste may be useful in stemming severe bleeding, including in internal organs, and in patients with clotting disorders or on blood thinners. This might become useful for the care of military and civilian trauma victims.” Dr. Nabzdyk is co-senior lead author of the study.
The paste consists of an injectable material that consists of a water-repelling oil matrix and bioadhesive microparticles. It’s the microparticles that link to each other and the surface of the tissue after the oil has provided a clean place to connect. The biomaterial slowly resorbs over a period of weeks.
The research was supported by MIT’s Deshpande Center, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Army Research Office, The Zoll Foundation, and the Samsung Scholarship. The technology is protected by a shared patent between MIT and Mayo Clinic.
For more on this research, see Bio-Inspired, Blood-Repelling Tissue Glue Can Seal Wounds Quickly and Stop Bleeding.
Reference: “Rapid and coagulation-independent haemostatic sealing by a paste inspired by barnacle glue” by Hyunwoo Yuk, Jingjing Wu, Tiffany L. Sarrafian, Xinyu Mao, Claudia E. Varela, Ellen T. Roche, Leigh G. Griffiths, Christoph S. Nabzdyk and Xuanhe Zhao, 9 August 2021, Nature Biomedical Engineering. DOI: 10.1038/s41551-021-00769-y
Co-authors are Hyunwoo Yuk, Ph.D.; Jingjing Wu, Ph.D.; Xinyu Mao, Ph.D.; Claudia Varela; Ellen Roche, Ph.D.; and Xuanhe Zhao, Ph.D., of MIT, and Tiffany Sarrafian Griffiths, D.V.M., Ph.D., and Leigh Griffiths, Ph.D., of Mayo Clinic.
Yep, great stuff; also good for cracked skin around finger nail.
From surgical product... “New Skin” is a cyanoacrylate isomer along with an antibiotic.
Great for mechanic’s who get little cuts all the time, and also in medical corpsmen’s kits. For major cuts there is something called “Thrombin” sheets of which “clot” the cut flesh and join it together temorarily or over the stitches/staples and protects from bacterial infection.
It sounds great but Im not going to get my hopes up until it actually hits the market. There was a product that I had read about quite a few years ago that was going to revolutionize first aid and save all kinds of lives. It was basically a type of people caulk. It supposedly sealed wounds instantly and had a pain killer in it too. They couldnt get approval for people right away but it was guaranteed to be available soon. Until then they could sell it to vets for use on horses.
15+ years and never heard of it again.
I could have used that this morning. Got out of bed and went to walk my German Shepherd. Before I was out the door she saw a squirrel and took off. I was attached to her with the leash. She pulled me off the stairs and onto a pile of sheet metal. I guess I was lucky to only get seven stiches but having some of that glue would have saved a trip to the hospital.
Super glue works well for small cuts.................
It was a big deep cut. About 5 inches long.
Yeah, that’s ER size..........................
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