
Embryo-inspired bandage is 17 times stickier than a Band-Aid - hhs
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/07/embryo-inspired-bandage-17-times-stickier-band-aid
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lisper
What a terrible headline. It completely misses the point, which is stated in
the first sentence of the article:

"Inspired by the superfast wound closing process in human embryos, a new,
Jell-O–like wound dressing can contract in response to the skin’s heat,
drawing the edges of wounds together for quicker, safer healing."

It's not the stickiness, is the contracting action in response to heat that
matters. If stickiness were what mattered you could solve that with super
glue. And in fact super glue can be and often is used to close wounds:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/health/04real.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/health/04real.html)

~~~
nkurz
I was more bothered by the primary claim in the article: "Wounds closed
halfway in less than 5 days versus a week or more for untreated wounds, the
team reports today in Science Advances." There's a number of issues here.

The first --- which isn't unclear in the article but bears repeating --- is
that the study was only done with mice. The new dressing helps artificial
wounds in mice heal faster than when the wounds are untreated. The effect on
humans (or maybe it's for veterinary use?) is implied, but untested.

Next, what's with the "less than 5 days" versus "a week or more" part? If the
goal was accuracy rather than advertising, wouldn't it be better to compare a
range against a range, or an average against an average, rather than an
average against a worst case?

Finally, why is a comparison against an untreated control even mentioned?
Presumably no one thinks that "no treatment" is the best treatment, so why not
compare against something real, preferably the state of the art?

On the bright side, the actual paper (which to their credit is linked from the
article) actually does this, and the apparent benefit gets smaller. Eyeing up
the relevant chart in the paper
([https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/7/eaaw396...](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/7/eaaw3963/F6.large.jpg)),
it looks like 50% wound closure is obtained in 4 days with the fancy dressing
instead of 6 days with a version without the special ingredient. This is a
perfectly respectable increase, which makes it even more disappointing that
the article uses the "a week or more" phrasing.

Seemingly less reasonable is that the same chart also shows a chitosan
treatment that has an even shorter time. There are some caveats that the
measurements were done differently (no splint to retard skin contraction), and
there are probably lots of reasons this might be better than something derived
from shellfish, but the lack of mention of this in the article makes me
conclude that it's an advertising fluff piece rather than a genuine attempt at
accurate communication.

~~~
gshdg
Yeah. The other interesting bit was how it could cost 1/1000 as much as the
existing state of the art (pennies per bandage instead of $100s), which is
pretty cool.

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ficklepickle
I would like to see the healing time compared with that of hydrocolloid[0]
bandages. Anecdotally, I have found them to be very effective at speeding
healing and minimizing scarring.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocolloid_dressing](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocolloid_dressing)

~~~
kibibyte
I've also found these pretty effective. I'm not sure if the hydrocolloid
itself is that helpful, but the fact that the bandage seals and blocks
moisture better definitely helps a lot.

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hhs
If interested there's a piece titled "A dressing that pulls wounds shut",
which offers a deeper context, here:
[https://harvardmagazine.com/2019/07/skin-
dressing](https://harvardmagazine.com/2019/07/skin-dressing).

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gshdg
Because bandaids aren’t already painful enough to remove?

~~~
emilfihlman
There could be some solvent that you use with it. Would be remarkably easy,
too.

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Iwan-Zotow
Good luck getting it out...

