Homely Scientist

We all know that cleaning a wound is essential to preventing infection. Infected wounds are also irrigated with sterile saline solution to clean them out and reduce infection. So what about water that actually help promote healing by killing pathogens? Pharma company Oculus thinks they are onto something here:

The firm’s Dermacyn topical wound care is an “oxychlorine formulation” using the company’s own Microcyn concoction, which is made by “taking purified water and passing it through a semi-permeable sodium chloride membrane to produce the oxychlorine ions,” and essentially contains “electrically charged molecules which pierce the cell walls of free-living microbes.” Source: Engadget

The first tests will be to treat diabetic foot infections.

Okay so that’s the news, what’s the deal? This is pretty amazing stuff really. The science of passing things through membranes to have some kind of beneficial outcome is really centuries old, you probably do it everyday … making coffee.

The principle, of course, is that a membrane will let some things through and others are blocked. For coffee, the filter keeps the grounds out, but lets coffee steeped water pass through. For reverse-osmosis filters, you are blocking out molecules that aren’t water (this is a big part of making salt water fresh in the Middle East). Sometimes, in the case above for example, the interaction between the fluid and the membrane brings another result–a new compound.

Back in the day I used a ton of filters in my lab work. My favourite was the filter that was really just cloth to get fine particles out of my samples and leave only the “good stuff”.

Tags: Dermacyn, oxychlorine, Oculus

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