What if wounds can be treated with a swipe of a handheld device? That’s just what a team from the University of Toronto set to find out when they developed a handheld device that deposits skin building substances directly on the affected area.
This handheld device works very much like a tape dispenser that continuously deposits a thin layer of collagen and other proteins, and could soon see some use as a way to treat patient’s wounds, especially those of burn victims.
The team from the University of Toronto believes that this could be the start of a device that can heal tissue on the spot, settling in and starting the healing process in two minutes or less.
“Most current 3D bioprinters are bulky, work at low speeds, are expensive and are incompatible with clinical application,” explained Associate Professor Axel Guenther, who supervised the project led by Ph.D. student Navid Hakimi alongside Dr. Marc Jeshcke, director of the Ross Tilley Burn Centre.
Details about this promising new device were recently published on the Lab on a Chip journal, as well.
Usually, patients with deep wounds or severe burn damage are normally treated with a technique called split-thickness skin grafting, which usually requires plenty of donor skin of the right match. For cases where the wound is too large, the lack of donor skin usually presents a huge problem.
… Read More
Click Read More to read the rest of the story from our content source/partners – The Christian Post.