Patient-Centric Devices Promise Cost-Efficient Advanced Wound Care

Article preview from Start-Up - July 1, 2011

The treatment of chronic wounds is challenging, not only because of the underlying biology, but also because of more practical considerations: fragmentation in the care settings, the logistics of delivering products to patients, and the costs of chronic care. Next generation advanced wound care companies are engineering solutions to these problems.

Patient-Centric Devices Promise Cost-Efficient Advanced Wound Care

Article preview from Start-Up - July 1, 2011

Advanced wound care is today a $5 billion industry, and it's growing because the underlying diseases that cause chronic wounds are also on the increase: diabetes, vascular disease, obesity, and the process of aging. There are 20 million people with chronic wounds in the world, five to seven million in the US, where the annual cost of treatment ranges from $20 to $30 billion.

Investors and strategics are very interested in "aging" plays these days, but that enthusiasm hasn't tended to extend to wound care, for a number of reasons. For one thing, chronic wounds – venous leg ulcers, pressure ulcers, diabetic foot ulcers – are scientifically challenging. By definition, they're the wounds that the body is not healing on its own because the environment around the wound is not healthy – the immune systems of patients are compromised, or the wound bed lacks perfusion because of vascular disease.

That understanding has caused the multibillion-dollar industry to focus on developing products that improve the wound healing environment – advanced dressings that absorb, hydrate, kill or retard the growth of bacteria and oxygenate the wound; negative pressure wound therapy devices that suction the ooze off and mechanically stimulate the wound bed; and cellular dermal substitutes.

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