Week 2:
Greetings Readers,
This week we have been tirelessly uncovering research involving Alginate hydrogels to get a better idea of how we can optimize our hydrogel bandage to deliver the necessary growth factors at a controlled rate, and figuring out what properties would allow this bandage to breakdown into the patient's skin. The reason we wanted our hydrogel to be absorbed by the patient is that the biggest obstacle to a burn victim's road to recovery is the fact that repeatably pulling off bandages impedes the healing process. By having the bandage be absorbed into the skin, we eliminate the need for multiple bandages, saving both time and money, while also accelerating the process of recovery. We were able to find a lot of similar research being done along the lines of wound healing with hydrogels, so we used information from those papers to further develop the technical design of our project. The links for these papers can be found at the bottom of this post. We found a paper that described a similar experiment to ours that was tailored toward skin rejuvenation, and since this has a lot in common with the process of healing burns, we got an idea of which growth factors we should incorporate into our hydrogel. We found another article that described how to achieve a cross-linked hydrogel structure by combining Alginate with Heparin-like molecules. The resulting mixture formed a hydrogel that was able to store proteins for up to 3 weeks, while still releasing them at a constant rate to a wound. This breakthrough was a major step this week in our mechanical and chemical design of our hydrogel because we now have a viable way of ensuring that our hydrogel can hold growth factors, and release them over a period of several weeks.
Growth Factors Article:
Greetings Readers,
This week we have been tirelessly uncovering research involving Alginate hydrogels to get a better idea of how we can optimize our hydrogel bandage to deliver the necessary growth factors at a controlled rate, and figuring out what properties would allow this bandage to breakdown into the patient's skin. The reason we wanted our hydrogel to be absorbed by the patient is that the biggest obstacle to a burn victim's road to recovery is the fact that repeatably pulling off bandages impedes the healing process. By having the bandage be absorbed into the skin, we eliminate the need for multiple bandages, saving both time and money, while also accelerating the process of recovery. We were able to find a lot of similar research being done along the lines of wound healing with hydrogels, so we used information from those papers to further develop the technical design of our project. The links for these papers can be found at the bottom of this post. We found a paper that described a similar experiment to ours that was tailored toward skin rejuvenation, and since this has a lot in common with the process of healing burns, we got an idea of which growth factors we should incorporate into our hydrogel. We found another article that described how to achieve a cross-linked hydrogel structure by combining Alginate with Heparin-like molecules. The resulting mixture formed a hydrogel that was able to store proteins for up to 3 weeks, while still releasing them at a constant rate to a wound. This breakthrough was a major step this week in our mechanical and chemical design of our hydrogel because we now have a viable way of ensuring that our hydrogel can hold growth factors, and release them over a period of several weeks.
Growth Factors Article:
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