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Funded by the Army, Oregon researchers turn to the sea to develop a revolutionary bandage that stanches heavy bleeding
An Oregon hospital that was merely trying to give itself an edge in physician recruitment and patient referrals unexpectedly owns a stake in what is arguably the biggest advance in wound dressing since the Civil War.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Kenton Gregory, director of the Oregon Medical Laser Center, was meeting with military officials at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. He was showing off the fruit of a $400,000 grant to help solve the battlefield's worst medical treatment problem: how to stop heavy bleeding. His solution was a 4-by-4-inch bandage derived from shrimp shells.
"Then we watched the planes crash into the (World Trade Center) and they said, 'We are going to war, and we need to get this through in a year,'" says Gregory, who is an interventional cardiologist and also a chemical engineer.
Eighty percent of the soldiers severely wounded in battle die in the first 10 minutes, mainly from bleeding, a grim statistic that hasn't changed much since the Civil War, Gregory says. Despite amazing advances in medical science, the material to stop bleeding-tourniquets and cotton gauze-hadn't changed until recently.
Scientists everywhere had been working on the problem, but the Army, which had been funding Gregory's unrelated efforts to find a biocompatible material that could be used to make new tissue, told him what it needed more than that was a bandage to stop bleeding. So for two years before that Sept. 11 meeting, Gregory's team at the Oregon Medical Laser Center had been working on the problem. The center is part of the Providence Heart Institute at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland; Providence St. Vincent is owned by Seattlebased Providence Health System.
Gone fishing
Once they committed to the effort, the Oregon researchers took everything they could find off the shelf and tested it-materials such as various proteins, volcanic dust and collagen, Gregory says. Then a senior chemist from China remembered reading something first reported in the 1950s: that chitosan-derived from chitin, the main ingredient of shrimp shells-attracted red blood cells, causing them to clot. Just applying a shrimp shell to a wound wouldn't work,...