Promising ecological plug to treat nosebleeds

Nosebleed, also known as epistaxis, is one of the most common ENT emergencies worldwide. It is estimated that 60% of the world’s population will suffer an episode of epistaxis at least once in their life, although only between 6% and 10% of them will seek medical attention. There are several methods to treat epistaxis and one of the most popular methods with a high success rate is nasal packing. However, the choice of the most suitable nasal plug is vital for the result of the treatment. The ideal nasal plug should promote hemostasis —the set of biological mechanisms to stop bleeding processes— and be comfortable for the patient, thus reducing damage to the nasal mucosa.

The NanoBioCel and BIOMAT groups of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) develop a nasal plug to treat nosebleeds, made from a circular economy approach, which has qualities superior to those of the best plug that exists today in the world. market. The nasal plug has been manufactured using by-products from the food industry such as soy protein and chitin from squid feathers.

The team led by Edorta Santos Vizcaíno, a researcher in the NanoBioCel group and one of the authors of the study, has shown that the by-products of the food industry are a valuable and sustainable source of biomaterials that can be used to manufacture safe and effective nasal plugs with great haemostatic properties. .

“From natural by-products of the food industry —soya protein and chitin— we have developed a scaffold or spongy matrix that has a series of very interesting physicochemical properties: it is capable of absorbing very large amounts of water or blood, it has a large surface for unite and house cells inside, it does not produce any type of rejection against the material and, furthermore, it partially degrades”, comments the UPV/EHU researcher.

A UPV/EHU team develops a nasal plug, using waste from the food industry, to deal with epistaxis (Photo: Nagore Iraola, UPV/EHU)

Chitin is the basis of this new structure, that is, the skeleton of the spongy material, while soy protein is responsible for lining said structure to make the material highly biocompatible and in turn capable of absorbing large amounts of blood.

“The growing social need to be respectful of the environment,” says the UPV/EHU researcher, “led us to investigate whether the sponge-like material produced from soy protein and chitin can be used as a nasal plug for the treatment of epistaxis ”. To evaluate the potential of our material as a nasal plug, “we have analyzed its use as a nasal plug, comparing it with the current “gold standard”, Merocel®, made with synthetic materials”, adds Santos.

The tests carried out both in vitro and in vivo in rats, “show that the material developed has a porous microstructure with a great capacity to absorb water and blood. Our biomaterial was found to effectively promote blood coagulation, showing excellent red blood cell and platelet binding properties compared to Merocel®. All this is due to the intrinsic hemostatic properties of its natural components”, comments Edorta Santos. In addition, “we saw that it is capable of losing weight in an aqueous medium and of partially degrading in a few days when it is submerged in blood, an increasingly important characteristic for nasal plugs, since otherwise their extraction is invasive”, adds the researcher .

In short, “our material produced from waste from the food industry showed mechanical and hemostatic properties superior to those of Merocel®”, concludes Edorta Santos.

The research staff of both research groups agree that “this work, carried out from a circular economy approach, shows that a green strategy can be followed to manufacture nasal plugs using recovered by-products from the food industry, with even better hemostatic properties than the gold standard in the clinic”.

“In fact, right now, we are in the process of applying for a European patent, trying to find a company that is interested in the product in order to materialize the idea and bet on this technology based on the concept of the circular economy,” says Edorta Santos.

Santos and his colleagues present the technical details of the material they are developing in the academic journal Materials Today Bio, under the title “Green hemostatic sponge-like scaffold composed of soy protein and chitin for the treatment of epistaxis”. (Source: UPV/EHU)