Archive for Steve Jung
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Video of the week: Steve Jung — ‘Controlling the formation of calcium compounds when bioactive glass reacts in vivo’
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Steve Jung made the above presentation at ACerS’ Glass and Optical Materials Division 2011 annual meeting and conference. The video is about 15 minutes long. If you tend toward squeamishness, be warned that a few slides show live tissue, wounds in various stages of healing, etc. Jung’s narrative stays focused on the glass, however, and the interaction between living tissue and the glass is really fascinating.
Jung is a colleague of Delbert Day and we have profiled their work on healing borate glass materials previously. Jung is also the senior research engineer at the MoSci Corp. in Rolla, Mo.
In this video, Jung discusses some of their findings about how several different glasses compositions, including ones containing copper, strontium, zinc and iron, affect living tissue (such as increased vascularization). Jung also discusses whether the formation of calcite by these glasses is useful… and, perhaps, even preferable.
Topics, such as this, will be delved into more deeply at ACerS’ “innovations in Biomedical Materials” meeting to be held later this year (abstract deadline is March 7).
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Healing glass fibers now available for pet and animal treatments
Rediheal borate glass fibers are successfully being used to treat injured green sea turtles and other animals. Credit: Avalon Medical Ltd.
One topic I and other ACerS staff frequently get asked about relates to a story from last April about the special healing borate-based glass fiber pads developed by glass scientists Delbert Day and Steve Jung in conjunction with MoSci Corp., a Rolla, Mo.-based glass products company. The news last year was that the glass fiber product, dubbed DermaFuse by MoSci, helped speed the healing of venous stasis ulcers in a majority of patients enrolled in a small human clinical test group of adult diabetics supervised by the internal review board of the Phelps County Regional Medical Center.
Most of the inquiries that come to me are from people who either are suffering with hard-to-heal skin ulcers or sores themselves or are reaching out to me on behalf of friends or family members who have the condition. Their questions are all pretty much along the lines of, “How can I or my doctors get my/their hands on DermaFuse?”
Up until just recently, I had to disappoint a lot of people because MoSci mainly does the R&D for glass products, and then licenses or reaches a supply agreement with third-party commercial companies and institutions, which then shepherd the products through regulatory processes and handle marketing and distribution. And, from what I understand, there are still testing, certification and agreements with distributors that need to be completed before it is authorized for human use.
However, the significant news is that Avalon Medical Ltd. has arranged for the DermaFuse material to be classified as “veterinary medical device” and is now marketing the product under the Rediheal brand to the veterinary and animal care marketplace.
According to the Rediheal website, the company is making the product for various size animals (”Equine version now available”) and is also offering a putty-like version of the product that can be shaped for bone healing.
While the story I originally wrote focused on a case study of human patients with venous stasis ulcers, it appears that Dermifuse/Rediheal material works shockingly well on many types of wounds. For example, the Rediheal website has several amazing animal case studies including large and small lacerations, dental void packing and gunshot wounds. (Warning - photos are not for the squeamish!)
In regard the gunshot wound case, a dog sustained at 42-square-inch wound in its back that was treated with Rediheal. According the company, the wound shrunk rapidly, and 40 days later it was nearly healed.
For me, one of the most jarring things about the gunshot wound is that there appears to be almost no scarring (see for yourself), and the dog’s fur seems to have completely regrown (albeit in a lighter color).
More information and case studies are on a special Rediheal/Avalon Facebook page, including successful efforts to heal injured green sea turtles at Jekyll Island, Ga.
One final note: Day and Jung (along with Mohamed N. Rahaman, B. Sonny Bal, Qiang Fu, Lynda F. Bonewald and Antoni P. Tomsia) also published a paper on this topic last summer in Acta Biomaterialia (doi:10.1016/j.actbio.2011.03.016), titled “Bioactive glass in tissue engineering.”
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Videos of the week: Successful wound healing with borate glass nanofibers
As reported on in the just-published May issue of the Bulletin of The American Ceramic Society, the Mo-Sci Corporation recently announced its development of a novel and inexpensive wound care pad — composed of borate glass nanofibers — that helped speed the healing of venous stasis ulcers in a majority of patients enrolled in a small human clinical test group of adult diabetics.
The tests were supervised by the internal review board of the Phelps County Regional Medical Center. Each of the 13 patients in the trial suffered from hard-to-heal lower leg wounds. Some patients had wounds that had failed to heal for more than two years.
Care for the patients in the study was delivered by a specialized wound-care nurse, supervised by a PCRMC physician. One patient dropped out in the early stages of the trial. Of the remaining 12, eight have had their wounds heal with little or no scarring. The wounds of the remaining four patients are nearly healed.
The wound-care pads, named ‘DermaFuse’ by Mo-Sci, will soon be tested at the Center for Wound Healing and Tissue Regeneration at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
In the first video interview, conducted in March 2011, Ted Day and Steve Jung discuss the trials and the glass fiber material used in the DermaFuse pads. Jung, along with veteran glass researcher Delbert Day (Ted’s father), developed the glass fibers while doing research at the Missouri University of Science & Technology in Rolla.
In the second video, Peggy Taylor, a nurse who specializes in wound care and who provided the treatment in the DermaFuse clinical trials, discusses the history of the trials, the patients and her use of the the glass fiber pads.
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