Imagine this: instead of just wrapping around your cut to protect it from dirt and bacteria, what if your bandage actually regrew your blood vessels in just one week to totally heal the cut?
A team of engineers at the University of Illinois has created a bandage that “in just one week not only encourages new blood vessel growth but helps guide that growth as well,” according to a story by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore at cnet.com.
"The ability to pattern functional blood vessels at this scale in living tissue has not been demonstrated before," co-principal investigator and electrical and computing engineering professor Rashid Bashir says in a school press release, Moore reports.
This new high-tech bandage is called a “microvascular stamp” and will aid efforts in tissue engineering.
The team will publish their findings in a January 2012 issue of the journal Advanced Materials, according to Moore. Moore explains that the way the stamp works is that the living cells contained in it work to help the damaged tissue grow according to the stamp's pattern.
“At nearly a centimeter across, the stamp is made of porous material that enables small molecules to sneak through in addition to the larger growth factors,” Moore writes. The astounding discovery came about when the team tested it on a chicken embryo. When they removed the stamp from the surface of the embryo a week later, “a network of new blood vessels appeared in the pattern of the stamp's channels,” Moore reports.
According to the university press release, other labs “have embedded growth factors in wound-healing materials” to orchestrate blood vessel growth, but the microvascular stamp approach is the first to use live cells, as posted by Bill Gillette at modernmedicine.com.
Its work is not done. Future applications of the microvascular stamp could include not only healing wounds, but also helping blood vessels to regrow around blocked arteries, and even improving the way cancer drugs are delivered by repairing blood vessels that feed cancerous cells.
Deborah DiSesa Hirsch is an award-winning health and technology writer who has worked for newspapers, magazines and IBM in her 20-year career. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by
Rich Steeves
