Electric dressing promises treatment of chronic wounds

In tests on diabetic mice, wounds that were treated with these electric bandages healed 30 per cent faster than wounds treated with conventional bandages. The team’s findings are detailed in Science Advances.

Chronic wounds are open wounds that heal slowly, if at all. Diabetic foot ulcers are chronic wounds that are problematic because they often recur after treatment and significantly increase the risk of amputation and death. According to the team, it is well established that electric fields accelerate healing in chronic wounds.

One of the challenges associated with chronic wounds is that existing treatment options are very expensive.

The project’s goal was to develop technology that reduces the cost of treatment and for the dressing to be applied by people in their homes.

To this end, the team developed water-powered, electronics-free dressings (WPEDs), which are disposable wound dressings that have electrodes on one side and a small, biocompatible battery on the other.

The dressing is applied to a patient so that the electrodes encounter the wound. A drop of water is then applied to the battery, which activates it. The battery includes a magnesium anode and a silver/silver chloride cathode with a dry cellulose separator impregnated with sodium chloride. Once activated, the bandage produces an electric field.

Rajaram Kaveti, co-first author of the study and a post-doctoral researcher at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, explained that the patient will not feel any sensation from the dressing, which weighs 290mg.

Kaveti added that the kirigami-inspired structure provides a unique approach to addressing complex, deep, and irregularly shaped three-dimensional wounds, which is a significant improvement over traditional wound dressings.

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In use, the dressing provides long hours of electrotherapy with a voltage of around 1.5V.

“The duration of stimulation and power output offered by the dressing depends on the impedance of the wound which changes as the wound heals,” said Kaveti. “The impedance gradually increases from 10 to 60kΩ from the day of injury to full recovery.”

The WPED also features a real-time humidity indicator that offers immediate feedback on the separator's moisture level.

“It also demonstrates exceptional durability and functionality across a wide range of temperatures, humidity levels, and pressures,” said Kaveti.

Additionally, the dressing has been designed to be compatible with standard roll-to-roll manufacturing processes typically used in commercial bandage production.

“This ensures that our technology can seamlessly integrate into existing manufacturing frameworks,” said Kaveti. “We have filed a disclosure and are actively exploring avenues for commercialising our technology.”

The research team includes experts from NC State, Columbia Engineering, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the joint biomedical engineering program at NC State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Korea University, Georgia Tech, and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology.

This project is part of a DARPA (US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) project to accelerate wound healing with personalised wound dressings.