AsianScientist (Dec. 28, 2018) – Using electricity to treat skin wounds may sound unconventional, but scientists in China and the US have developed a self-powered bandage that accelerated wound healing in rats. The findings are published in the journal ACS Nano.
Skin has a remarkable ability to heal itself, but in some people, such as those suffering from diabetes, wounds heal very slowly or not at all. Such patients are thus at risk of chronic pain, infection and scarring.
Doctors have explored various approaches to help chronic wounds heal, including bandaging, dressing, exposure to oxygen and growth-factor therapy, but these methods often show limited effectiveness. Meanwhile, as early as the 1960s, researchers have observed that electrical stimulation could help skin wounds heal. However, the equipment for generating an electric field is often large and may require patient hospitalization.
In the present study, researchers in China and the US have developed an electronic bandage (e-bandage) that generates an electric field over an injury, dramatically reducing the healing time for skin wounds in rats. To power their e-bandage, the researchers made a wearable nanogenerator by overlapping sheets of polytetrafluoroethylene, copper foil and polyethylene terephthalate.
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 the backs of rats. Wounds covered by e-bandages closed within three days, compared with 12 days for a control bandage with no electric field. The researchers attributed the faster wound healing to enhanced fibroblast migration, proliferation and differentiation induced by the electric field.
The article can be found at: Long et al. (2018) Effective Wound Healing Enabled by Discrete Alternative Electric Fields from Wearable Nanogenerators.
———
Source: American Chemical Society; Photo: Shutterstock.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.
