Most people who pass away following severe burns usually succumb to infections brought on by their immunocompromised state, not the trauma itself, but a new kind of bandage may be able to prevent these fatalities in the future, according to a new Scientific Reports study.
In addition to playing havoc with a victim’s immune system, severe burns can cause the loss of skin on various parts of the body, researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) explained. The bandages typically used to treat such wounds can be a breeding ground for bacteria, and many of those microbes are resistant to antibiotics, they added.
Credit: Murielle Michetti, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
To combat the problem, the EPFL-led team used a kind of biodegradable dressing made from animal collagen and quickly-multiplying progenitor cells that was first developed in 2005, and added dendrimers, a kind of molecule which can prevent burn wounds from becoming infected. The new bandage can also help speed up the healing process, they explained in a statement.
Discovery could prevent the need to constantly replace dressing
The researchers focused their efforts on the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which they note is the primary cause of infections and death among burn victims. If a collagen bandage is placed on a burn site, a portion of the dendrimers it is infused with migrate to the wound and destroy nearby bacteria, while the others remain in the bandage for protection.
As Dominique Pioletti, the head of EPFL’s Laboratory of Biomechanical Orthopedics, explained in a statement, bandages “are a favorable environment for bacterial growth,” which means that a portion of the dendrimers “have to remain in the bandage to destroy any intruders.”
The technology fills an urgent need for many doctors and burn specialists, said Lee Ann Laurent-Applegate, head of the University Hospital of Lausanne (CHUV) Regenerative Therapy Unit. As she pointed out, treating burns currently requires doctors to “take enormous precautions with our patients,” including changing a patient’s dressing “every day for several months.”
Even doing so “does not stop infections, and we cannot prescribe antibiotics to all patients as a preventive measure for fear of making the bacteria more resistant. With the new bandages, rather than treating infections, we will be preventing them,” Laurent-Applegate added. However, these new bandages will need to undergo further testing before they can be used in hospitals.
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Image credit: Murielle Michetti, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
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