Novel bandage may help fracture recovery by trapping body's healing molecules: Study

Researchers have engineered a bandage that aggregates and holds one of the body's own pro-healing molecules at the site of a bone break, an advance that may lead to new ways of accelerating the natural healing process.

The study, published in the journal Advanced Materials, noted that the bandage helped accelerate blood vessel formation in mice, and achieve better bone repair within three weeks.

The researchers, including those from Duke University in the US, said the findings may lead to a general method for improving bone repair after damage that may find applications in medical products like biodegradable bandages, implant coatings, or bone grafts.

The discovery is based on an earlier finding that biomaterials made of the chemical calcium phosphate promotes bone repair and regeneration.

One of the study's co-authors, Shyni Varghese from Duke University, had discovered that the biomolecule adenosine played a particularly large role in spurring bone growth.

Varghese and her team had .