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Freudenberg's new nonwovens heal chronic wounds faster

28 May '14
4 min read

The latest product developments in advanced wound care mark a further milestone in medical nonwovens for Freudenberg Nonwovens. The company has developed nonwovens made of chitosan fibers that accelerate the healing process in the treatment of chronic wounds.
 
For the last 40 years, the backbone of the company’s product developments has been a highly-specialized development department and long-standing customer relations, without which many innovative projects would not have been possible.
 
Today, the product portfolio focuses on developments in advanced wound care. As Dr. Oliver Heneric, who heads the Medical Segment at Freudenberg Nonwovens, explains: “One goal for us is to stimulate the human body’s capacity to heal itself following an acute injury. And another is to help make life easier for people with chronic wounds, like diabetics.” This leads to challenging specifications for wound dressings used for vein and arterial disease. 
 
Over the last few years, the company has developed new, highly-complex products such as solutions featuring chitosan fibers and won new customers for these innovations. In combination with a hydroactive nonwoven, these fibers bring new perspectives for the healing process and are already proving their worth in practice. Chitosan is a biopolymer derived from the shells of sea crustaceans which stops bleeding and helps wounds heal more quickly.
 
A moist wound environment is much more conducive to the healing process than a dry one. This was established by the English physician George Winter in the 1960s: He discovered that wounds healed twice as fast under a moisture-regulating polymer film than was the case when treated with a dry dressing. Over the next decades developers such as the experts at Freudenberg carried out research on suitable materials and gathered experience in applications such as the treatment of chronic wounds. 
 
Today, advanced wound care is used in all industrialized nations and in a growing number of emerging economies. The benefits of this form of treatment are that no scab is formed and new tissue is encouraged to grow.
 
In many instances, the moist wound environment halves the healing time compared with the traditional dry therapy. Antimicrobial products reduce the risk of infection for the patient. Moist wound care has great potential: The global market volume in the next ten to fifteen years is estimated at three billion euros.

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