Next-Generation, Micro-Needle Medical Adhesive

Brigham and Women's Hospital researchers Bohdan Pomahac, MD, and Jeffrey Karp, PhD, are vying for the hospital's 2013 BRIght Futures Prize with their creation, a micro-needle medical adhesive that can easily attach to tissue to rapidly seal wounds. When the micro-needle tips come in contact with wet tissue, they swell and change their shape, interlocking with the tissue. Medication can be loaded into the micro-needles in high concentrations, delivering long-term treatment and minimizing side effects. The adhesive could provide a completely new way for doctors to treat damaged tissue, including severely burned skin.

Transcript

00:00:06 Our skin is the largest organ. It covers our entire body, acting as an armor to keep germs out and keep our body temperature in check so we don't overheat or get too cold. When our skin is damaged by serious burns, surgeons need to apply skin grafts to restore functioning so our skin can continue to protect us. Doctors Jeffrey Karp and Bohdan Pomahac are developing an adhesive made up of tiny shape-changing needles. They hope that their micro-fasteners

00:00:35 will be the next generation of surgical adhesives to provide rapid wound care while minimizing tissue damage and scarring. You're using sutures and staples that have been around probably as long as surgery discipline itself, and although fundamentally those are incredibly useful tools, they have their limitations. What I'm hoping is that we would be able to develop a tool that would secure and provide adequate attachments of different types of tissues together.

00:01:06 Should we be successful, which I truly believe we would be, we would eliminate pooling of fluid in between the interface of the graft and wound bed. We could eliminate infections. We could eliminate mechanical forces and shear. All of those are factors that cause failure of our surgical procedures. What we envision is having an array of microneedles that we could place through the skin graft into the underlying tissue and we can achieve intimate contact that would prevent the accumulation of fluid and thus maximize the chance that

00:01:42 the graft would take and we wouldn't need to go back and do another procedure. I could envision that the patients that are currently staying in the hospital for 5-7 days, using this device, could simply go home the same day after the operation. So because the tips of these needles can swell when we place them into water, what we also found is that we can very easily load these microneedles with potentially any type of medicine, and all we need to do is have a solution with the medicine inside

00:02:16 and we place the microneedles into that solution. The tips will then swell and the medicine will go into the microneedles. We can take them out, and they'll dry, and then we can place it back into tissue, into a wet environment, and slowly that medicine can be released. We showed that this could be used for a wide variety of different types of medical agents, anything from small molecules to even active biological agents such as proteins or peptides. We'd be incredibly fortunate and very excited to win this prize

00:02:49 and I think our priority is to rapidly accelerate in relevant model systems so that we can bring this innovation to patients in as short a time as possible.