Natural bandage developed at MCVH promotes faster healing

Imagine putting a bandage on a wound that immediately stops bleeding, promotes healing and never needs to be replaced. Researchers at VCU have developed what they call a natural bandage which promises to revolutionize the treatment of wounds.

“It is not a cloth, it is a biological fabric that is basically a clot,” said Marcus Carr, an internal medicine professor at VCU Health Systems. “When you have bleeding you put this (substance) directly on the bleeding site and it absorbs blood into it and it is an immediate clot. So the potential is there to stop bleeding in seconds.”

The first results of the research that led to the development of this biological material were published in the Feb. 12 issue of Nano Letters, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society. Carr, Gary Bowlin, associate professor of biomedical engineering, David Simpson, associate professor of anatomy and neurobiology, and Gary Wnek, chair of the chemical engineering department worked on the research project.

The Bandage

The natural bandage is microspun fibrinogen, Carr said. Fibrinogen is a protein found in the bloodstream and plays a key role in blood clotting.

“What that means is that you take the fibrinogen and spin it into a fabric, like a gauze,” explained Carr.

When a person is cut, the body activates its clotting mechanism, which breaks down the fibrinogen and converts it to fibrin.

“Fibrin is the meshwork, the netting,” Bowlin said. “It’s like throwing a net over the clot that holds it together and keeps it from dissolving quickly.”

Once the material is in place the body incorporates it into the wound and then removes it with a set of enzymes called clot busters.

A technique called electrospinning is used to produce the “natural bandage.” During the process, polymer solutions are subdivided into nano-fibers in the presence of a high-voltage electric field, Carr said. The fibers are then caught on a flat surface and form microporous materials.

“A nice thing about electrospinning is that you can dial in, basically, the structure of the clot and have huge impacts on its mechanical properties, the holes in it or the sizes the cells have to crawl through, and how rapidly it dissolves,” Carr said. “So you can tailor it to what you want.”

Electrospinning is not new. The process was first used in the 1930s by the textile industry, but it did not catch on because it was difficult to mass-produce fabric using the technique. During the 1980s, polymer scientists used it to make nano-fibers.

“We took the concept of electrospinning and applied it to natural polymers for tissue engineering,” said Bowlin. “The key is that we’re making these fibers at basically the same dimensions you would find in a natural clot. So when the body sees it, it sees it as normal.”

What’s next?

While the technology that created the biological material has been available for decades, the researchers at VCU Health Systems are the first to make this material.

“We have developed electrospun fibrinogen and that has never been done before and a patent is pending on that,” said Carr.

Development of the biological material for use outside the laboratory is in preliminary stages. The researchers have applied for $1.2 million in grant money from the National Institutes of Health to develop and characterize the best natural bandage.

“We will use the grant to define the best characteristics for the bandage and use it in animal models and by the time that is over, we should be at the point where we would be ready to enter clinical trials,” said Carr.