If you’ve ever received an open wound that requires closing up with a bit more vigor than a regular bandage, you may have come across butterfly closures. These adhesive bandage strips can be used to close small wounds by pulling the skin on either side of the skin break together, and then holding them in place. Their big advantage over stitches is the fact that they’re easier to care for and lessen the risk of scarring.
Well, move over Steri-Strips — because there’s a new solution in town, and it’s pretty darn neat!
Called ClozeX, it’s a needleless, adhesive-based wound closure that’s incredibly easy to apply and can used to treat both trauma lacerations and surgical incisions. It’s reportedly been used in more than 10,000 surgeries in fifty hospitals — with surgeries including appendectomies, hernias and pediatric heart surgery. Eleven different sizes are available, and these can be placed side by side in situations requiring larger closures.
“The applications in the real world include closing surgery incisions in every hospital,” Michael Lebner, founder of ClozeX Medical, told Digital Trends. “For the emergency department, patients — especially children — fearful of needles can have a better ClozeX closure without the fear of a needle for the anesthetic and the suture closure. Because it is easy to learn and use there will be significant use outside the hospitals. It begins with health-care trained: medics, first responders, nurses [and] EMTs, and will become a standard in mini-clinics.”
Lebner, who isn’t a trained physician, created ClozeX after his daughter suffered a snowboarding knee injury and his wife suffered a hand laceration: both resulting in unsightly looking scars after they were sutured. In the aftermath, he turned his invention skills to coming up with an alternative. Since then, development has been a decade-long process, although Lebner said that the resulting product is ready to roll out to the general public.
“We expect [the] ClozeX product to be available in about eight weeks,” he said. Information about product pricing, training and the like will follow in the coming days and weeks. Between this, 3D-printed skin and smart bandages that use nanosensors to track how a wound is healing, it’s like an ER department from the future.
Provided ClozeX works as well as it looks like it does, this could turn out to be a real game-changer. At the very least, we’ve got this oddly satisfying video to enjoy!
