A sticky gel plaster containing the yellow pigment in turmeric can patch up punctured lungs in rats. It also seems to help wounds heal when loaded up with sacs of biological molecules.
Biodegradable gel patches often need to be glued to the body parts they are intended to help repair and can struggle to follow the movement of organs like lungs as they inflate and deflate.
Now, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her colleagues have made a gel patch that should be biodegradable and can stretch up to four times its length without breaking, as well as instantly sticking to organs without needing any glue.
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Its stickiness comes from the opposite charges of molecules in the gel and the damaged tissue, which quickly form chemical bonds. The nanoparticles of curcumin 鈥� the yellow pigment in turmeric 鈥� that it contains are known to be antimicrobial and to reduce inflammation.
To test how well the gel could patch up punctured lungs, the team first measured the air pressure in the lungs of three rats to be roughly 71 pascals, before poking 1-centimetre-deep holes in their lungs with a needle nearly 1.3 millimetres wide. The injuries caused their lung pressure to drop to less than 57 pascals.
By placing patches over the rats鈥� injuries, the team completely restored the rodents鈥� lung pressure. Another experiment by the team found that the patch could stretch and contract with the inflation and deflation of rat lungs.
鈥淭his research is very exciting. The unique structure gives the gel great deformability compared to similar gels and it can adhere to moving organs even more strongly than other gels that are stuck by glue,鈥� says 聽at the University of Manitoba in Canada.
Nguyen and her colleagues then tested how well the gel could heal skin wounds in mice. They created 6-millimetre-wide circular wounds in 15 mice that were left untreated, given patches or given patches soaked in a solution containing many exosomes, tiny sacs generated by all cells that carry a mix of useful biological molecules.
Six days after the injuries, the wounds of mice given curcumin-containing patches soaked in exosomes had decreased in size by about 60 per cent. Meanwhile, those in mice without patches or with curcumin-containing patches not loaded with exosomes had healed by less than 20 per cent, suggesting the patch could be used to deliver drugs for the regeneration of wounds.
鈥淚t is possible that the gel could seal punctured lungs but also induce wound healing in the future, though this needs to be tested,鈥� says Xing.
Reference: bioRxiv, DOI:
