Transforming Wound Care: Sensor-Based Dressings and Novel Therapeutics in Healing

Announcer:
You’re listening to Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD. On this episode, Dr. Geoffrey Gurtner will discuss the future of smart monitoring and therapeutics in wound care. He’s the Chair of the Department of Surgery and a Professor of Surgery and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson. Here’s Dr. Gurtner now.

Dr. Gurtner:
My own group here at the University of Arizona is developing a sensor based dressing. The concept is that patients in between hospital visits and in between doctor visits are without any kind of monitoring for long periods of time. Even if they are seen once a week, there’s 168 hours between those visits where they aren’t being seen, and those are the times when infection can occur. And it would be very helpful to know earlier rather than later that someone is developing an infection so you could treat it aggressively.

What typically happens is patients wait until it’s very late in the process and then sometimes need to go to the operating room for debridement and potentially have amputations. Certainly with diabetic foot ulcers, that’s relatively common. And so although there’s nothing currently on the market, I think a sensor-based dressing that could predict or at least signal that an infection is brewing would be potentially transformational and might prevent amputations, readmissions and morbidity and mortality in these patients. 

I’m particularly excited to get small molecule therapeutics like drugs into the wound-healing space. When you actually look at the entirety of wound healing, including burns, pressure ulcers, diabetic foot ulcers, and venous leg ulcers, there are no approved small-molecule drugs in that entire medical area, and there never have been. Compared to high blood pressure or other disease states where there’s all sorts of different drugs, we really don’t have any in wound healing.

And I do think the fact that we continue to struggle with patients who have nonhealing wounds really signals that there’s a huge unmet need. And so I’m excited about companies and individuals and laboratories that are trying to bring drugs into the wound-healing space because I think dressings and different varieties of advanced dressings really haven’t moved the needle on the outcomes for patients and the cost for the healthcare system. 

If we look ahead to the future of medicine, it’s hard for me to believe that the day won’t come when we can more simply, quickly, and efficiently heal wounds.

Announcer:
That was Dr. Geoffrey Gurtner talking about evolving strategies in wound care. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!