New materials will not simply cover wounds—they will be able to alert doctors to problems and deliver fine-tuned drugs
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The injured soldiers had been treated well since their return from fighting in Afghanistan. At the San Antonio Military Medical Center in Texas, surgeons had carefully grafted healthy tissue over their burns and wounds, using microsurgery to connect their blood vessels to the new skin. But the patients still faced an uncertain recovery. The vessels might not supply enough oxygen for the transplants to thrive.
When Conor Evans visited San Antonio in 2010 and saw these soldiers, he realized that conventional techniques for monitoring oxygen levels did not work very well, and they often failed to give enough warning if the graft was failing. “What these physicians do is nothing short of amazing,” says Evans, a chemist at Harvard Medical School and the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. “But the sensors they had just weren't cutting it.”
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