IIT-Madras invention to aid diabetic patients

Hyderabad: The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras has invented a way to treat wounds in diabetic patients that do not heal rapidly, even causing amputation in extreme cases. The new method uses graphenexide-loaded nanocomposite scaffolds to treat both normal and diabetic wounds.

The invention will prove greatly useful in the treatment of chronic non-healing wounds in diabetis, which still pose a major clinical challenge. Though some commercially available wound dressings do focus on diabetic wounds, they are very expensive. As the diabetic population in India keeps growing, treating these wounds is a major clinical and social challenge.

Speaking about the method, Prof. Vignesh Muthuvijayan of IIT Madras said, “We wanted to exploit graphene-based materials’ ability to improve blood vessel formation at certain concentrations to prepare an inexpensive wound dressing.

The psyllium-reduced graphene oxide nanocomposite that we created has shown exciting results in animal studies.”

A convex lens was used to focus sunlight on graphene oxide to obtain reduced graphene oxide. These reduced graphene oxide dispersions were loaded into a plant carbohydrate polymer (psyllium) solution to obtain wound dressing scaffolds. Diabetic wounds treated with the dressings healed in 20 days, compared to 26 days for wounds treated using other methods.