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Puncture-resistant surgical gloves, hook worms for healing get grant money from New Jersey

A professor of surgery and a dean for research with New Jersey medical schools are […]

A professor of surgery and a dean for research with New Jersey medical schools are getting grant money from the state to build a better pair of surgical gloves and use parasites to help wounds heal faster.

New Jersey Health Foundation’s innovation stage funding program offers grants of $10,000 to $50,000 to healthcare professionals advancing research that can be commercialized to improve consumer care.

A pair of puncture resistant surgical gloves developed by Dr. Tomer Davidov at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick takes aim at the worryingly widespread problem of needle wounds, especially among doctors and other healthcare professionals in surgical training. According to frequently referenced New England Journal of Medicine survey, most surgeons surveyed (99 percent)  said they’d had a needle stick injury during their training. In about half of these situations it was with a high risk patient.

Although there are currently anti-puncture surgical gloves in the market, Davidov’s grant will go towards developing a prototype using a flexible, thin material.

Dr William Gause is using a substance derived from metazoan parasites to enhance tissue repair in wound treatment. Intestinal parasites like hookworms that cause disease in hundreds of million people in developing countries could be used to enhance treatment of lung disease and wounds. Through his research, Gause has observed that the presence of the worms provokes the body to produce an immune response which can trigger a rapid repair protocol.

The New Jersey Health Foundation set up the grant program last year to prevent funding gaps for research scientists that tend to happen between the seed stage and later stages for their research. It is open to researchers from the eight schools affiliated with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. It also runs a Foundation Venture Capital Group that invests in life science companies.

 

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