Advanced bandage encourages blood vessel growth

Back in the day when I was a kid, scraped knees and abrasions happen so often, the sting of antiseptic on my wounds no longer wield their power of fear over me. Bandages are also normal to patch my knees and elbows up, but those are just meant to keep the nasties away. How time has changed things, with researchers over at the University of Illinois having developed a far more advanced bandage. In fact, this high tech bandage is said to encourage the growth of blood vessels, where it takes just a week to have new blood vessels mirror the bandage’s own pattern.

Not only is blood vessel encouraged, this new bandage will also help guide the growth. Co-principal investigator and electrical and computing engineering professor Rashid Bashir says, “The ability to pattern functional blood vessels at this scale in living tissue has not been demonstrated before.” Dubbing this bandage a “microvascular stamp”, it holds living cells that will encourage damaged tissue to grow according following the pattern on the stamp.