CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WVIR) – The University of Virginia School of Medicine is teaming up with a Charlottesville company to create a new burn treatment.
Typically when skin is burned, the area surrounding it is impacted and dead, too. This new treatment is a cream that is put directly on severe wounds.
“Our hope is that by doing this, we can actually limit the amount of skin grafts people have to get and be able to treat especially like warfighters,” Doctor Mark Roeser said.
Roeser says the idea behind the drug comes from a type oflung treatment that is usually given in an IV. That form, however, is not convenient to treat burns.
“The time of injury is obviously the part of when you want to get the medication on you,” Roeser said. “So if it’s in a cream form, we can apply it more rapidly.”
Roeser is working with Charlottesville-based pharmaceutical company, Purnovate, which is a subsidiary of Adial, to make that happen.
“We’ve already done work to determine that our drugs seem to work well in skin penetration,” Adial CEO William Stilley said.
Stilley says his company has a history of working with UVA, which is why he and Roeser are taking this next step together.
“He’s going to take our molecules, put them into a cream, and then use them use that to try to develop something that would help him promote healing,” Stilley said.
“This will keep the burns limited to only the part, or at least try to limit to only the part that’s injured and not the part that your body enters either accidentally, or for whatever reason your body does that,” Roeser said.
The cream is supposed to reduce inflammation on burns.
“So much of the body’s damage can be caused by inflammation,” Stilley said. “And if we can have a good anti-inflammatory, there’s a number of different important diseases we can really help.”
The teams think if this works, it could be applied to other wounds, and be used in places where quick treatment counts, like war zones.
Read more here.