Embryo-inspired bandage is 17 times stickier than a Band-Aid
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
"Inspired by the superfast wound closing process in human embryos, a new, Jell-O–like wound dressing can contract in response to the skin’s heat, drawing the edges of wounds together for quicker, safer healing."
It's not the stickiness, is the contracting action in response to heat that matters. If stickiness were what mattered you could solve that with super glue. And in fact super glue can be and often is used to close wounds:
The first --- which isn't unclear in the article but bears repeating --- is that the study was only done with mice. The new dressing helps artificial wounds in mice heal faster than when the wounds are untreated. The effect on humans (or maybe it's for veterinary use?) is implied, but untested.
Next, what's with the "less than 5 days" versus "a week or more" part? If the goal was accuracy rather than advertising, wouldn't it be better to compare a range against a range, or an average against an average, rather than an average against a worst case?
Finally, why is a comparison against an untreated control even mentioned? Presumably no one thinks that "no treatment" is the best treatment, so why not compare against something real, preferably the state of the art?
On the bright side, the actual paper (which to their credit is linked from the article) actually does this, and the apparent benefit gets smaller. Eyeing up the relevant chart in the paper (https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/7/eaaw396...), it looks like 50% wound closure is obtained in 4 days with the fancy dressing instead of 6 days with a version without the special ingredient. This is a perfectly respectable increase, which makes it even more disappointing that the article uses the "a week or more" phrasing.
Seemingly less reasonable is that the same chart also shows a chitosan treatment that has an even shorter time. There are some caveats that the measurements were done differently (no splint to retard skin contraction), and there are probably lots of reasons this might be better than something derived from shellfish, but the lack of mention of this in the article makes me conclude that it's an advertising fluff piece rather than a genuine attempt at accurate communication.