Dressings

Skin-applied microneedle patches are already used to painlessly deliver medication and detect chemicals in a patient's bloodstream. A new one, however, reportedly stops wounds from bleeding much more effectively than traditional bandages.

Chronic diabetic skin wounds are notoriously slow to heal, sometimes becoming so infected that amputations are required. A newly identified polymer could help keep that from happening, by radically boosting the healing process.

Getting a bandage to stick to your skin can sometimes be difficult, particularly if that skin is wet. This isn't a problem with an experimental new wound dressing however, which uses ultrasound-induced microbubbles to better bond with the skin.

Chronic skin ulcers are notoriously slow to heal, but an otherwise-wasted material may soon help change that. Scientists at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University have developed a new regenerative wound dressing, and it's made from frog skin.

Scientists at Brown University have developed a new material that can release drugs only when pathogenic bacteria are around. When used as a bandage, the hydrogel could deliver medication on-demand when infection begins to take hold.

Although silver is highly effective at killing bacteria, it can also be toxic to humans in large amounts. That's where a new wound dressing is intended to come in, as it only releases its silver payload when infections are present.

When removing the dressing to check on a chronic wound, you ironically often set back the healing process. A new type of "smart bandage" was designed with this problem in mind, as it transmits wound data to an app on a clinician's mobile device.

If you're trying to make a wound dressing that will be well-tolerated by the human body, you may be best off using human-derived materials. That's the approach that German researchers have taken, creating a tropoelastin-based bandage.

Chronic wounds can be very difficult to treat, potentially leading to amputations or even death due to associated infections. A new dressing, however, may be able to heal such wounds while remaining much less expensive than other materials.

New weapons against so-called “superbugs” are desperately needed. A new black phosphorus coating quickly kills bacteria and fungi, then dissolves within 24 hours – and best of all, bacteria can’t evolve resistance against this mode of attack.

​With a few experimental exceptions, bandages generally just cover wounds, as opposed to actively healing them. That's not the case with a new heat-activated "active adhesive dressing" (AAD), however, which forgoes antibiotics while mimicking embryonic skin.

An incredible study has demonstrated the potential of a wound dressing that can fight bacterial infections using a weak electrical field. Offering a novel way to battle antibiotic-resistant infections, the dressing has been approved by the FDA and is currently being tested in human burn patients.