Good bye to bleeding - This gel can make you stop bleeding instantly - Joe Landolina

Forget stitches — there's a better way to close wounds. In this talk, TED Fellow Joe Landolina talks about his invention — a medical gel that can instantly stop traumatic bleeding without the need to apply pressure.

Everybody knows that the body is made up of cells. So the cell is the most basic unit of life. But not many people know what else. But it actually turns out that your cells sit in this mesh of complicated fibers, proteins and sugars known as the extracellular matrix (ECM). So now, the ECM is actually this mesh that holds the cells in place, provides structure for your tissues, but it also gives the cells a home. It allows them to feel what they're doing, where they are, and tells them how to act and how to behave.

And it actually turns out that the extracellular matrix is different from every single part of the body. So the ECM in my skin is different than the ECM in my liver, and the ECM in different parts of the same organactually vary, so it's very difficult to be able to have a product that will react to the local extracellular matrix, which is exactly what we're trying to do.

The extracellular matrix is incredibly diverse in three dimensions. On top of that, the extracellular matrix is responsible for all wound healing, so if you imagine cutting the body, you actually have to rebuild this very complex ECM in order to get it to form again, and a scar, in fact, is actually poorly formed extracellular matrix.

Your cells sit in this complicated mesh and as you move throughout the tissue, the extracellular matrix changes. So now every other piece of technology on the market can only manage a two- dimensional approximation of the extracellular matrix, which means that it doesn't fit in with the tissue itself.

What Joe Landolina discovered was you could actually take small pieces of plant-derived polymers and reassemble them onto the wound. So if you have a bleeding wound, you can actually put our material onto this, and just like Lego blocks, it'll reassemble into the local tissue. So that means if you put it onto liver, it turns into something that looks like liver, and if you put it onto skin, it turns into something that looks just like skin. So when you put the gel on, it actually reassembles into this local tissue. So now, this has a whole bunch of applications, but basically the idea is, wherever you put this product, you're able to reassemble into it immediately.

Read the full transcript here.......

Related articles

• VETI-GEL Stops Your Bleeding Instantly
• Excessive Activity of Repair Cells in Tissue Recovery Linked With Fibrosis
• Over-organizing repair cells set the stage for fibrosis
• A Three-Dimensional Computational Model of Collagen Network Mechanics
• Wow of the week: A gel that can stop bleeding instantly
• Reflections on TEDGlobal 2014, from the community