Chinese scientists created suture threads that accelerate wound healing

By Alimat Aliyeva

Chinese biochemists have developed decomposable suture threads that accelerate wound healing after surgery, Azernews reports.

The material generates a weak electric field when injected into the human body or animals. This field accelerates wound healing by about 59% and significantly reduces the risk of postoperative infections. When developing it, scientists took into account that all human and animal body tissues produce a relatively weak but well-fixed electric field in the process of vital activity, which plays an important role in the processes of human body growth and wound healing.

In recent years, doctors and biologists have already accelerated wound healing and regeneration of damaged tissues and organs using electric fields, but in all these experiments, external sources of electricity were used. They are almost impossible or extremely difficult to use outside hospitals or laboratories, which prompted Chinese biochemists to create a material that generates an electric field when implanted into a patient's body.

The specialists managed to select such sizes of interlayers made of two polymer materials - polycaprolactone and a copolymer of lactic and glycolic acids - in which their interaction under compression and stretching conditions generates an electric field whose voltage is approximately 2.8 volts. This field, as shown by experiments conducted by scientists on rats, persists for more than ten weeks after suturing.

Such wound stimulation, according to the researchers, accelerated the migration of stem cells to the damaged regions of the rodents' muscles and skin by about 2-3 times, as a result of which a deep cut on one of their hind legs healed 59% faster than in the rats from the control group. In addition, scientists have not detected the development of postoperative infections in animals whose wounds were sewn up with new surgical threads, which is an additional advantage from the use of this composite material.