A new technique aims to prevent blood loss and save lives by using a rapidly expanding foam

June 1, 2013 Leave a comment

A new technique aims to prevent blood loss and save lives by using a rapidly expanding foam

Jun 1st 2013 |From the print edition

ON OBSERVING that most injured soldiers died before receiving medical attention, Dominique-Jean Larrey, a young surgeon in Napoleon’s army, proposed installing surgical teams near the front lines. Horse-drawn carriages would whisk the wounded from the battlefield to the closest field hospital, dramatically reducing casualties. Today the whisking is done by helicopter or ambulance and the treatment on arrival is incomparably better.

But whereas clever bandages help deal with external injuries, little progress has been made in helping soldiers with innards ravaged by bullets or shrapnel survive the trip to the operating table. Upma Sharma and her colleagues at Arsenal Medical, a start-up based in Massachusetts, hope to change that. They are developing a way to help a field medic stanch blood loss from punctured organs.Over the past decade researchers have experimented with injecting a variety of foaming agents into the abdomen to absorb and clot blood gushing from an internal injury. These efforts stumbled, however, because the rate at which blood was being lost outpaced the foam’s capacity to soak it up.

Arsenal Medical’s technology uses two types of liquid, called polyol and isocyanate. When injected through the navel, they react to form a polyurethane polymer. In the process, they rapidly expand to 30 times their original volume, forcing the abdomen to distend and allowing the resulting foam to access all the nooks and crannies of the abdominal cavity. Within a minute, the foam solidifies into a cast around all the internal organs within the cavity, applying enough pressure to stanch bleeding in the affected areas without inhibiting uninjured organs.

After testing 1,200 different formulations, the team hit upon a combination of liquids which expands and solidifies at the right rate (too slow and the foam would be pushed back by the pressure of the gushing blood; too quick and it would solidify before it fills the cavity). It also wraps snugly around the organs and is easily removed during surgery.

As bullets and bombs get better at taking life, it is heartening to know that modern medicine is becoming better equipped to preserve it.

Filed under Health

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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