New high-tech bandage may be the key to healing chronic wounds

The familiar peel-and-stick bandages seen on skinned knees worldwide may soon be a thing of the past.

Scientists have now developed a bandage that can heal wounds faster and easier by using an array of tiny, built-in electronics.

But the new high-tech bandage has uses far beyond skinned knees.

“Over 6.7 million people in the United States alone suffer from chronic non-healing wounds including diabetic ulcers, non-healing surgical wounds [and] burns,” the researchers wrote in the journal Science Advances.

These and other non-healing wounds add up to “a staggering financial burden of over $25 billion per year,” they wrote.

To address this problem, the researchers developed an elastic polymer patch that can deliver antibiotic medication and a low current of electricity.

Electrotherapy — the electric stimulation of wounds — has been shown to promote healing by stimulating the growth of collagen and attracting immune cells to the wound.

Additionally, biosensors included in the electronics can detect and record details about a wound’s inflammation, infection level and stage of healing.

“Biochemical signals open up new opportunities because you’re able to really probe what’s happening on a molecular level,” bioengineer Yuanwen Jiang at the University of Pennsylvania told Scientific American.

“That’s the key novelty here,” Jiang added.

Another innovation added to the bandage is an antibiotic drug contained inside a gel pack that’s released when stimulated by an electrode. 

The electric bandage hasn’t yet been tried in humans, but a rodent study provided key insights into the bandage’s effectiveness.

The rodents had diabetic wounds, and the bandage’s electronics accurately measured the wounds’ changes over time.

The bandage’s treatments allowed the wounds to heal completely in two weeks — but the wounds on a control group of rodents without the bandage didn’t heal during that time period.

“We hope to apply this smart bandage technology in humans in the next year,” said Wei Gao, study co-author and biomedical engineer at the California Institute of Technology.

“Hopefully the information we get can really benefit people with chronic wounds,” Gao added.

The need is definitely there: Current therapies such as skin grafts often require multiple procedures or surgeries.

Antibiotics are increasingly prescribed to patients with non-healing wounds, but the overuse of antibiotics can lead to drug resistance in bacteria, resulting in the rise of “superbugs.”

And infected wounds can prolong the healing process and lead to necrosis, sepsis and even death, the study authors reported.