This Wound-Healing Smart Bandage Disappears Entirely When the Work Is Done

Scientists at Northwestern University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chung-Ang University, and the Dalian University of Technology have come up with a battery-free electronic bandage which cuts healing time by nearly a third — and that disappears when the job's done.

"When a person develops a wound, the goal is always to close that wound as quickly as possible," explains Guillermo A. Ameer, co-lead of the project. "Otherwise, an open wound is susceptible to infection. And, for people with diabetes, infections are even harder to treat and more dangerous. For these patients, there is a major unmet need for cost-effective solutions that really work for them. Our new bandage is cost-effective, easy to apply, adaptable, comfortable and efficient at closing wounds to prevent infections and further complications."

While we've seen electronic bandages which claim to cut healing time by between a quarter and a third before — such as this patch from the Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiative which monitors a wound for infection risk while stimulating it to speed healing — this new variant has a key twist: it's transient, meaning that when the bandage has done its job it's harmlessly absorbed into the body, leaving no trace it was ever there.

"Although it's an electronic device, the active components that interface with the wound bed are entirely resorbable," explains fellow co-lead John A. Rogers. "As such, the materials disappear naturally after the healing process is complete, thereby avoiding any damage to the tissue that could otherwise be caused by physical extraction."

The team's testing on diabetic ulcers in mice saw healing time reduced by 30 percent, through electrical stimulation delivered by the bandage. "We tried to restore or promote a more normal electrical environment across the wound," Ameer says of the approach. "We observed that cells rapidly migrated into the wound and regenerated skin tissue in the area. The new skin tissue included new blood vessels, and inflammation was subdued."

The team's work has been published under open-access terms in the journal Science Advances; the researchers have confirmed plans to proceed to testing on a larger animal model prior to human testing.