'Natural' Bandage Helps Stop Bleeding

Feb. 13, 2003 -- Imagine spinning a fabric with fibers 1,000 times thinner than a human hair. That technology is the secret behind a new nano-fiber mat that could eventually be used as a natural bandage that stops bleeding and never has to be taken off.

By using the same substance your body uses to clot blood, researchers have developed a fabric that can be applied to a wound to reduce blood loss and is then gradually absorbed by the body. The material is spun from tiny strands of fibrinogen, a natural protein found in the body that is broken down by the blood during bleeding and converted to fibrin at the site of injury.

'Fibrin is the meshwork, the netting,' says researchers Gary Bowlin, PhD, professor of biomedical engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University, in a news release. 'It's like throwing a net over the clot that holds it together and keeps it from dissolving quickly.'

Once the blood clot is formed at the site of the wound, that meshwork provided by the fabric helps set the stage for the natural healing process.

Although the material has not yet been tested in humans, researchers say the new technique used in weaving the fabric, called 'electrospinning,' creates fibers that are virtually the exact same size of the natural fibrinogen fibers found in the body.

'The key is that we're making these fibers at basically the same dimensions you would find in a natural clot,' says Bowlin. 'So when the body sees it, it sees it as a normal, and it's going to promote normal things to happen.'

The findings appear in the Feb. 12 issue of Nano Letters.

Researchers say bandages made of the new fabric could be used for anything from minor cuts to battlefield wounds, when it important to stop bleeding immediately while waiting to transport to a hospital.

SOURCE: Nano Letters, Feb. 12, 2003 • News release, American Chemical Society.