14 DAY TRIAL // US company RevMedx hopes it will not be long before it is given permission to market an innovative syringe that tests have shown is capable of fixing the damage caused by a gunshot in just 15 seconds.
The syringe in question, a picture of which is available next to this article, is called Xstat, and works by injected small sponges into a wound.
Once inside the cavity created by a gunshot, these sponges, whose size is comparable to that of a run-off-the-mill aspirin or paracetamol tablet, start to get bigger.
Eventually, they expand so much that they fill the wound, RT explains. What's more, they have been designed in such way that they stick to moist surfaces like live tissue.
This means that they cannot all that easily be pushed out of a wound, and are therefore fairly efficient at controlling and even stopping bleeding.
“The core technology behind the XStat dressing is mini-sponges that expand upon contact with blood – resulting in a nearly immediate hemostatic effect without manual compression,” RevMedx explains.
The company argues that this innovative syringe would particularly come in handy on the battlefield.
This is because it is especially in war conditions that doctors lack the time and the tools needed to perform complex procedures intended to stop blood flow originating in a gunshot wound.
Thus, all a doctor would have to do to treat a war injury with the help of the XStat would be to insert the syringe inside a wound, and then press the plunger so as to release the sponges.
On its website, RevMedx goes on to detail that the sponges are made from wood pulp, which is coated with a substance dubbed chitosan. The latter has antimicrobial properties, and also encourages clotting.
To ensure that when the time comes to remove the sponges from a patient's body, none of them is left behind, the wood pulp tablets all have an X on them.
This mark shows up on X-rays, and helps specialists keep track of how many sponges are inside a patient's body at a given moment.
The syringe has until now been tested on animals alone, yet it performed so well that the United States Army agreed to offer RevMedx funds amounting to $5 million (€3.69 million).
The company is working on developing three different types of Xstats, each of which will serve to treat a very specific type of wound and will cost some $100 (€73.96).
The country's Food and Drug Administration is expected to also approve the use of this syringe to treat bleeding wounds in the not so distant future.