Professor Meital Zilberman of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering has developed a special dissolvable fiber loaded with antibiotics which can be made into a wound dressing.
Although this may seem to be a simple concept, skin functions in a complex way which is not easily mimicked.
Skin, Prof. Zilberman explains, serves a number of vastly different purposes. “Wound dressings must maintain a certain level of moisture while acting as a shield,” she says. “Like skin, they must also enable fluids from the wound to leave the infected tissue at a certain rate. It can’t be too fast or too slow. If too fast, the wound will dry out and it won’t heal properly. If too slow, there’s a real risk of increased contamination.”
Severe burns are a particularly nasty variety of dermal damage. About 70% of people with severe burns die from infections, not from their actual wounds. In a valiant effort to help patients survive the healing process nurses must change dressings often to prevent infection by cleaning the wounded areas. This new wound dressing can change all that by eliminating the need for constant redressing and by applying high levels of antibiotics precisely where they are needed.
Unlike oral antibiotics, locally-applied antibiotics can target and kill harmful bacteria before they enter the body to cause further infection, sepsis, or death. “People who suffer from large burns don’t usually die from the condition itself. The fatal culprits are the secondary bacterial infections that invade the body through these vulnerable burned areas,” says Prof. Zilberman.
The new TAU dressing inhibits bacterial growth and is biodegradable, which helps doctors avoid constant wound cleaning and redressing, allowing the body to do the work on its own. “When administered at the wound, a doctor can give relatively high but local doses of antibiotics, avoiding any toxicity issues that arise when the same amount of antibiotic passes through the body,” explains Prof. Zilberman, who worked on this research with Jonathan Elsner, her Ph.D. student.
The only sad part of this news is how early in the development phase it is in right now.
Prof. Zilberman is now starting the early stages of clinical trials on animal models. So far, her wound dressing has passed physical and mechanical tests in vitro and in bacterial inhibition tests in the laboratory. She is also seeking a strategic partner to co-develop the research and take it to the commercial stage.
If this revolutionary new wound dressing survives the clinical stage then it may begin appearing in hospital near you within a few short years.
