A wound covered by an electric bandage on a rat's skin (top left) healed faster than a wound under a control bandage (right).
Credit: American Chemical Society
Skin has a remarkable ability to heal itself. But in some
cases, chronic skin wounds include diabetic foot ulcers, venous ulcers and
non-healing surgical wounds heal very slowly or not at all, putting a person at
risk for chronic pain, infection and scarring. Doctors have tried various
approaches to help chronic wounds heal, including bandaging, dressing, exposure
to oxygen and growth-factor therapy, but they often show limited effectiveness.
Now, researchers have developed a self-powered bandage that generates an
electric field over an injury, dramatically reducing the healing time for skin
wounds in rats. Weibo Cai, Xudong Wang and colleagues wanted to develop
a flexible, self-powered bandage that could convert skin movements into a
therapeutic electric field.
To power their electric bandage, or e-bandage, the
researchers made a wearable nanogenerator by overlapping sheets of
polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), copper foil and polyethylene terephthalate
(PET). The nanogenerator converted skin movements, which occur during normal
activity or even breathing, into small electrical pulses. This current flowed
to two working electrodes that were placed on either side of the skin wound to
produce a weak electric field. The team tested the device by placing it over
wounds on rats' backs. Wounds covered by e-bandages closed within 3 days,
compared with 12 days for a control bandage with no electric field. The
researchers attribute the faster wound healing to enhanced fibroblast
migration, proliferation and differentiation induced by the electric field.
Ref: Yin Long, Hao Wei, Jun
Li, Guang Yao, Bo Yu, Dalong Ni, Angela LF Gibson, Xiaoli Lan, Yadong Jiang,
Weibo Cai, Xudong Wang. Effective Wound Healing Enabled by Discrete
Alternative Electric Fields from Wearable Nanogenerators. ACS Nano,
2018.
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