CHENOVE, France — Far from the common-or-garden sticking plaster, medical companies and researchers are in search of to create the “ultimate dressing”—synthetic pores and skin they hope will revolutionize the therapy of extreme burns.
For the final 18 months, researchers from the French agency Urgo have been working in direction of reaching this Holy Grail of wound therapy, which might save severe burn victims from the painful and repeated pores and skin grafts they at the moment endure.
The €100-million ($106-million) “Genesis” venture hopes to have a product prepared by 2030.
Guirec Le Lous, the president of Urgo’s medical arm, advised AFP that it’s a “crazy” venture.
“Are we capable of designing artificial skin in a laboratory? No one in the world has succeeded,” he mentioned.
Inside Urgo’s laboratory in Chenove, close to the jap French metropolis of Dijon, residing cells are being chilled earlier than they are often cultivated.
“You have to be able to recreate all the functions of skin,” together with defending in opposition to exterior threats and regulating the temperature, Le Lous mentioned.
It should even be comparatively simple to make, as a result of synthetic pores and skin should be “available for all and at the right price,” he mentioned, with out revealing the precise expertise or sort of cells Urgo is utilizing.
Urgo, a family-owned business since 1880, has lengthy made dressings for power wounds akin to diabetic foot ulcers and venous leg ulcers.
“Since the 2000s, we have worked on materials that will correct healing problems: dressings have become intelligent, interactive with wounds, allowing them to perform better,” Urgo’s analysis director Laurent Apert mentioned.
He referred to as the change “a revolution.”
Silver bullet
Urgo is much from alone in pushing the boundaries of what dressings can do.
Researchers on the University of South Australia have developed a brand new form of dressing that is aware of when to launch nanoparticles of silver, which may break down antibiotic-resistant micro organism.
“Our treatment is unique in that it capitalizes on the antibacterial properties of silver, but avoids over-exposure, by only activating when infection is present,” lead researcher Zlatko Kopecki mentioned in a press release.
This makes the dressing “a much safer and effective treatment for children,” he added.
Children undergo virtually half of burn accidents worldwide, most of them aged between one to 5 years outdated, in accordance with analysis utilizing the World Health Organization’s Global Burn Registry.
‘Night and day’
Another new approach does away with the concept of dressing altogether.
For a product from French startup VistaCare Medical, sufferers put their affected leg into a big gadget which by no means touches their wound.
Instead the chamber controls the humidity, temperature and different points essential to therapeutic.
“There is no more dressing. The idea is to put the wound in an enclosure, in sterile air, VistaCare Medical president Francois Dufay said.
“With this technique, we offer the wound with what it wants, on the proper time.”
VistaCare Medical’s device is currently used in around 20 French hospitals, but next year the firm plans to apply for approval in the United States for a product to be used in the home.
The new developments have shaken up the world of wound healing, long a neglected area of medical research.
Isabelle Fromantin, who heads the wounds and healing research unit at the Curie Institute in Paris, said that “in comparison with 20 years in the past, it is evening and day by way of wound care.”
Along with her team, Fromantin has developed dressings that reduce the odors from necrotic wounds seen in some cancers.
However she said that not everything can be achieved by new technologies—healing is a process that varies from person to person, depending on their age and health.
“Believing {that a} dressing will heal you all by itself is utopian,” she mentioned. — AFP
