2008 Woodie Awards
Blue crabs could quicken blood clots
Laura Grammar
Issue date: 5/5/08 Section: News
Maryland's blue crabs aren't just tasty; they could soon prove the key to victims of burns and chronic wounds heal faster.
A group of graduate students at the university is working on a special bandage that uses an enzyme - called Chitosan - derived from the crabs to help blood clot and induce skin-regeneration in patients.
"There are not a lot a good ways to regenerate healthy tissue," said graduate student Matthew Dowling, one of the three involved with the technology. "We came up with a system that we thought would be novel and useful and would be able to have a doctor administer to the patent and have them get out of the hospital immediately," he said.
The team, which also comprises graduate students Oluwatosin Ogunsola and Peter Thomas, met when they all worked together in a professor's lab. "One of the ideas that had been floating around for a bit was using a material that we have been using in the lab for awhile and using it as a part of a wound-healing system," said Dowling.
In addition to that material, chitosan, which helps the blood to clot more quickly, the bandage uses a growth factor that incites the body to heal and create new skin around the area of the wound, Dowling said.
It builds off the idea of a bandage created for the army by Hemcon Medical Technologies that also uses chitosan to aid in clotting the blood. The university team's bandage differs in two key ways, said Gregory Payne, a chitosan expert from university's biotechnology institute.
"One of the problems with the existing bandage is that it'll stay on for a little while, but then it just falls off," he said. "This one seems to interact with the cells and, conceivably, the tissue, and might actually keep it on and actually start the next stages of wound healing, so maybe you could get it to do a little bit more."
Dowling said the team is working on raising money and that they hope to have FDA approval for a severe bleeding bandage in a year, though approval for a chronic-wound bandage might take seven years.
"[Chitosan is] well-known to be a biocompatible material," said Dowling. "The advantage for us... [is that] if the FDA is familiar with the component, it helps the process along and takes less time."
A group of graduate students at the university is working on a special bandage that uses an enzyme - called Chitosan - derived from the crabs to help blood clot and induce skin-regeneration in patients.
"There are not a lot a good ways to regenerate healthy tissue," said graduate student Matthew Dowling, one of the three involved with the technology. "We came up with a system that we thought would be novel and useful and would be able to have a doctor administer to the patent and have them get out of the hospital immediately," he said.
The team, which also comprises graduate students Oluwatosin Ogunsola and Peter Thomas, met when they all worked together in a professor's lab. "One of the ideas that had been floating around for a bit was using a material that we have been using in the lab for awhile and using it as a part of a wound-healing system," said Dowling.
In addition to that material, chitosan, which helps the blood to clot more quickly, the bandage uses a growth factor that incites the body to heal and create new skin around the area of the wound, Dowling said.
It builds off the idea of a bandage created for the army by Hemcon Medical Technologies that also uses chitosan to aid in clotting the blood. The university team's bandage differs in two key ways, said Gregory Payne, a chitosan expert from university's biotechnology institute.
"One of the problems with the existing bandage is that it'll stay on for a little while, but then it just falls off," he said. "This one seems to interact with the cells and, conceivably, the tissue, and might actually keep it on and actually start the next stages of wound healing, so maybe you could get it to do a little bit more."
Dowling said the team is working on raising money and that they hope to have FDA approval for a severe bleeding bandage in a year, though approval for a chronic-wound bandage might take seven years.
"[Chitosan is] well-known to be a biocompatible material," said Dowling. "The advantage for us... [is that] if the FDA is familiar with the component, it helps the process along and takes less time."
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