http://www.edmontonjournal.com/opinion/B...

Burn victims saved by silver lining

Uof A researcher wins $100,000 award for high-tech bandage

A local researcher who developed the new treatment of choice for severe-burn victims will receive a $100,000 award on Friday in Vancouver.

Rob Burrell's Acticoat silver-coated bandages are credited for saving thousands of lives around the world. The company spun out of his research has sold 17 million units in more than 40 countries and supports more than 100 high-tech jobs in Fort Saskatchewan.

New money will help Burrell push the research further.

"We're looking at developing it as more than a bandage. We're looking at developing it as a drug," said Burrell, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Nanostructured Biomaterials at the University of Alberta.

Inflammation in the lungs is a significant cause of death and experimental trials are already going on with the same silver particles dissolved into a solution and inhaled, he said.

The $100,000 award is from the Ernest C. Manning Awards Foundation, which supports Canadian innovators, and sponsored by EnCana.

The key to the success of the bandages are the tiny, nanostructured crystals of silver that line the inside and slowly dissolve into an open wound.

Normally, silver is stable and would only dissolve in trace amounts. Before Acticoat was developed, most textbooks said making a soluble form of metallic silver was impossible.

Burrell proved differently. By shooting argon particles at a block of silver, Burrell and his team were able to knock individual atoms of silver loose. Then they carefully controlled the amount of kinetic energy the atoms were exposed to, and got the atoms to restructure on the bandages into crystals several hundred times smaller than would occur in nature.

These crystals do dissolve into wounds, and are incredibly effective anti-microbial and anti-inflammatory agents.

Several leading experts in the field wrote to support Burrell's application for the award, including Gregory Schultz, head of the Wound Healing Society, who compared the development of the silver technology and the bandages with the development of penicillin.

Dr. Mayer Tenenhaus, who treats about 300 burn patients a year, called it "the biggest breakthrough in wound care in the last 40 years," since Charles Fox invented silver sulfadiazine cream in 1967.

Burrell tells stories about one of the first patients treated, a young girl who pulled a bowl of hot water off a stove and got severe burns from her shoulder to her wrist.

"Not knowing how well it would work, the doctors thought they would only treat half the wound with it," said Burrell. They wrapped the upper arm in the new bandage and used common treatments on the lower arm. "The end result was they had to graft the lower arm and the upper arm healed. It was that observation that triggered us to look at the anti-inflammatory effects. That was really neat. One of the very first patients had an outcome that was really quite amazing."