Hard To Heal Wounds

Not every wound is hard to heal from the beginning, need for improvements and coordinated care in many patients seen in clinical practice contribute to them becoming hard to heal. Many think that infection can be diagnosed exclusively by microbiological swab making many patients receive unneeded and inappropriate antibiotic therapy, if nothing is done to address gaps in management of hard to heal wounds it will contribute to antimicrobial resistance, and the ability to heal wounds will become 10 times more difficult.

Neem Biotech is working on a development inspired by a discovery from a natural compound in garlic, working with a novel mechanism of quorum sensing inhibition that is essentially how bacteria communicate: as they get to a certain density of cells they start to release chemicals that communicate between the cells, resulting in production of virulence factors such as biofilm.

Virulence factors such as biofilm can be affected when they are made up of mixed populations of bacteria, which is clinically relevant as it mirrors environments seen in wounds or in respiratory infection. Researchers have shown their approach works well in synergy with antibiotics and/or antiseptics which can be used as standard of care in wound treatment and has no negative impact on healing.

According to the researchers their work addresses gaps in current understandings and clinical management of hard to heal wounds. Many existing therapies used for infection such as systemic antibiotics or topical antimicrobials have limited effect when there may be a biofilm present; ability to disrupt the biofilm opens new paths for management of complex, common, and expensive clinical problems.

This is a novel approach to antimicrobial resistance which is a known major issue that has much ongoing research trying to find way to overcome it. Though it is unlikely the innovation will cause hard to heal wound to disappear completely as there may be many reasons why a wound is hard to heal, but the technology offers an ability to intervene in wounds where infection is the main cause or one of the causes for it becoming hard to heal.