Physician resource and healthcare news source Doximity, recently published an article outlining a treatment that may save lives of those injured in car crashes and other injury accidents. Glue made of nanoparticles, delivered by a needle, can be a better replacement for sutures and surgical staples. Further it may lessen the amount of pain and suffering accident patients experience after surgical procedures. This new treatment minimizes surgical scars and may have other applications in the modern healthcare field as well. While this new treatment has a while to go before being used in hospitals, emergency rooms, and surgical centers, the current outlook looks promising.
You’re in the ER with appendicitis. Surgeons can remove your appendix through a few three-fourth-inch openings, but the bulky sutures and staples they use to close internal incisions are difficult and time-consuming to manipulate. One day it may be possible to patch you up faster and more easily using glue made of nanoparticles, which can be injected through a needle for use in minimally invasive surgeries and eye surgery.
In order to inject the glue through a whisker-thin needle without clogging it, the researchers developed a way to make it in the form of nanoparticles, which solidified and formed a seal when a second chemical was injected. The glue can be delivered more quickly and with a smaller instrument than those needed to place sutures or staples, and its elastic properties better match those of the tissue around it. “It’s similar to a rubber band that you can stretch over and over again, except this is fully degradable,” says Karp.
Currently healthcare researchers have tested the glue on animal surgeries and if they continue to succeed with animal testing, they will move to clinical human trials in the not too distant future.