UCF Researchers Develop Innovative Spongelike Bandage to Stop Excessive Bleeding
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Without proper medical invention, injuries sustained from traffic collisions, serious workplace accidents or weapons may result in fatal hemorrhaging. University of Central Florida researchers aim to prevent such bleeding in potentially deadly situations with a new hemostatic spongelike bandage with antimicrobial efficacy that they recently developed and detailed in a newly published study in the journal Biomaterials Science.
The method Kausik Mukhopadhyay assistant professor of materials science and engineering at UCF and study co-author and his team developed is called SilFoam as it's more of a foam than a traditional bandage wrap. SilFoam is a liquid gel comprised of siloxanes (silicon and oxygen) that is delivered via a special two-chamber syringe which rapidly expands into a spongy foam upon exposure to each other within the wound in under one minute. The sponge applies pressure to restrict the hemorrhage at the delivery site while also serving as an antibacterial agent because of the silver oxide in it.
For every five milliliters of gel injected, you can expect an expansion of about 35 milliliters, Mukhopadhyay says.
"Anytime you have a profuse bleeding or bleeding, you want to press on top and stop the bleeding," he says. "So, what we did here is actually the same thing. Instead of putting the hand, we injected it, and it creates a voluminous expansion."
Mukhopadhyay and his collaborators found that their sponge also resulted in a more gentle removal.
"During the reaction, it generates a little bit amount of heat that helps the process very fast," he says. "On top of that, oxygen gas as part of the reaction's byproduct, tries to come out. So instead of making it a cross-linkable rubber, it's a soft sponge with a lot of internal porosity."
They used specially crafted mannequins designed with realistic blood vessels and wounds developed by a local company called SIMETRI to test their foam on in hopes the preliminary results were promising enough to proceed with further testing.
"One of the most important parts of this was that we used non-invasive models," Mukhopadhyay says. "At this phase, we can get approvals and move forward to study the in vivo models. At this stage, there are no psychological effects on vets or surgeons either."
The experimentation showed promise, especially when the researchers compared SilFoam to five other existing treatment methods.
They found that SilFoam had many advantages such as significantly less leakage, room-temperature storage versus requiring cold temperatures, ultimately lower cost of materials, little to no training requirements to use the syringe.
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