A breakthrough in wound healing bandages using nanotechnology, an Egyptian startup innovated this new tech to take the wound healing process to the next level.
As long as you have human skin, you must have experienced at least one injury that caused a wound, which makes the field of wound care of interest to researchers and scientists thousands of years before the existence of laboratories, ancient civilizations such as the Egyptian, Roman and Chinese civilizations, before the existence of medicine, relied on nature in healing wounds.
NanoEbers: Connecting Technology to Urgent Market Needs
An Egyptian company has managed to bring this mentality back again, by combining modern technologies in the field of medicine with extracts of nature to come up with innovative wound bandages, as researchers at NanoEbers, a startup that connects technological innovations with the urgent needs of the wound care market, have developed wound bandages. Made of biodegradable nanofibers, added with medicinal and antibacterial plant extracts and high concentrations of honey and chitosan.
The company uses different types of medicinal plants found in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula to produce a new type of bandage with a stronger anti-bacterial boost, and a higher concentration of honey, to help heal the skin from wounds faster and more effectively.
The company has different wound care products, but it chose to innovate the bandages as the company’s prototype because it had the highest market potential.
Its innovative hemostatic sponge has the ability to instantly stop bleeding, absorbing 40 times its weight in blood in just 30 seconds. The foam is made from easily available, cost-effective biocompatible natural materials, optimized with an optimized porous structure and loaded with coagulation-accelerating materials.
Many wound care companies are moving recently towards innovation in the manufacture of bandages and the integration of new technologies to increase their effectiveness, the most prominent of these technologies is nanotechnology, which is what the Egyptian team relied on, led by Dr. Hassan Azazi, but they combined this technology with nature to come up with a bandage that is more effective in healing.
How Do Nanotechnology & Nature Contribute to Wound Healing?
When the skin is injured, the body begins the process of “wound healing”, which is a complex process of repairing and remodeling damaged tissue, and it comes through four stages: blood clotting, inflammation, reproduction, and finally remodeling, in order to restore the shape of the skin to what it was before the wound.
Human wound care intervention seeks to promote the healing process of wounds in the shortest possible time, with minimal pain, and to ensure that wounds do not leave permanent scars for the patient. Therefore, wound care includes procedures such as bandages, analgesics, anti-inflammatory agents, topical antimicrobial agents, healing-promoting medications, and others.
Over the past centuries, plants have played an important functional role within these procedures, as the ability of some medicinal plants has been proven to promote blood clotting, fight infection and accelerate wound healing, reduce the number of bacteria, and improve collagen deposition, such as cinnamon extracts that speed up wound healing with their antioxidant properties, Acting as a natural antimicrobial, aloe vera extracts reduce wound inflammation and provide more granular tissue that promotes healing.
Reliance on medicinal plants is increasing, especially in wound care, due to their low cost on the one hand, and the lack of side effects on the other hand, in parallel with the high risk of wounds due to the increase in cases and age-related diseases such as diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular diseases.
The global wound care market size was approximately $15.25 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow to $24.01 billion by 2028.
Nanotechnology is Changing the Shape and Effectiveness of Wound bandages
Nanotechnology has revolutionized the world of medicine and disease treatment. Nanofibres have gained increasing interest in skin regeneration after they have demonstrated their ability to provide support for tissue repair, in addition to acting as a regulator for the delivery of drugs, proteins, growth factors and other molecules.
Nanofibres are soft materials with two main components, the first kills bacteria by damaging their surface structures and disrupting their natural activities, while the second has flexible properties that mimic human skin, forming a skin-like patch to cover wounds and provide a suitable environment for wound healing.
Another advantage of nanofibers is their biodegradability, which means that they can be naturally absorbed by the skin during treatment.
An experimental study was conducted on mice infected with drug-resistant bacteria that demonstrated that bandages containing nanofibers are better than conventional bandages, in terms of rapid removal of bacterial infection, significantly reduced wound size, and reduced wound closure time compared to a commercial bandage.
Nano-delivery systems have demonstrated many other benefits in the wound healing process, including reducing drug toxicity, administering poorly water-soluble drugs, improving skin penetration, enhancing antimicrobial activity, protecting drugs from light and temperature, as well as stimulating fibroblast proliferation and reducing inflammation.
In another experiment using nanotechnology to make bandages of the future, researchers at the University of Wisconsin / Madison have developed a bandage that has proven effective in healing wounds four times faster than a traditional bandage, relying on the body’s natural movement to generate an electric field, after researchers knew that electric fields help in Wounds heal faster.
The bandage works by using a small generator, called a “nanogenerator”, whose task is to capture energy from the body’s natural movements such as breathing and shivering and convert it into light electrical pulses that are sent to an electrode in the bandage, to create an electric field around the wound, which helps direct the movement of skin cells for healing More efficient.
The role of nanotechnology is not limited to emergency wounds, but nanotechnology has succeeded in reducing the duration of treatment for chronic wounds from 5 years to 6 months, according to the Second Gulf Conference on Wounds 2020 in Dubai.
The interest in wound care is growing with the emergence of new technologies every day to reduce its risks and reduce the time to heal the skin from it, but it seems that the combination of modern techniques and ancient methods that rely on nature will attract the attention of major companies in the coming years.
