Mass Effect Medi-gel to the rescue!

http://www.technewsdaily.com/17202-veti-gel-stops-bleeding.html

Very, very, very cool. I really hope this becomes commercially available and is cheap enough to become a standard product in first aid kits and in all emergency wards and ambulances. Hell, if it was cheap enough I'd carry it with me everywhere.

Now all I need is to figure out how to transfer my consciousness to my clone, and I'll live forever!

 

Products like this already exist. The US military used Celox for years - though I believe they're not any more, or at least have transferred away from the direct application method - and a number of ambulance services used to carry it. Chitoflex and QuickClot have been around for a few years as well. In fact, the idea of it has been around since 1977, when Muzzarelli looked at the effect of chitin on wounds.

This is just a start up along similar lines, pimping out their product via press release before actually publishing any data.

The big thing here is something I'm going to quote from a study comparing the effectiveness on ChitoFlex, Celox and QuickClot in controlling haemorrhage from a groin injury.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S073646790900105X

Besides that serious efficacy/cost problem when compared to gauze, other disadvantages of clotting agents are that they can cause localised burning on application (though this has been partially resolved by changing the method of application from being pour on to , and can lead to greater complications when medical staff try and remove the clotting agent. Yes, in some cases it allows people who would otherwise not have been able to get to a specialist medical team to get to one, but there are significant complications that mean that these sort of products simply aren't (at this stage) a cure all to wounds.

At this stage, without any results, it would be great if it worked, but any discussion is highly speculative, given the problems with other available clotting agents already on the market.

 

Different product.

For one thing, this one doesn't require refrigeration.

 

Neither does Celox. I don't think ChitoFlex does either. It's just another clotting agent, except this one hasn't had any published results. You're currently talking about a potential product being promoted by a startup, not the science behind it. Until there is peer review to actually show that there is some new scientific basis for discussion....

 

It's still interesting.

Oh wait, sorry, I forgot. I don't have a PhD so I can't discuss topics of interest here.

 

http://suneris.co/veti-gel/uses

It does seem somewhat different to the existing agents.

For example Celox is granular that causes blood clotting to create a plug, veti-gel is a polymer gel that binds to the surface of tissue.

Agree, there's not much information e.g. what happens to the polymer plug over days and weeks? Can it be left in place and the body's own healing process takes over?
How easily can it be removed in case an artery needs to be repaired to restore blood flow to a limb?