WOCN Announces Resources for Texas Flood Victims
The Wound, Ostomy, and Continence Nurses Society (WOCN) has released resources to support communities impacted by the flooding in Texas’s Hill Country earlier this month.
The list, released by WOCN on July 15, includes clean-up and recovery guides, as well as resources specifically for wound, ostomy and continence care patients who need supplies or services. The association has also listed resources for stakeholders who want to donate time or funds to organizations supporting affected communities.
Researchers Successfully Use Yogurt in Tissue Repair Study
Columbia Engineering researchers at Columbia University in New York used yogurt in a recent project involving tissue engineering and regenerative medicine — and found the household staple to be even more useful than they first imagined.
In the article “Extracellular vesicles as dynamic crosslinkers for bioactive injectable hydrogels,” published in Matter on July 25, researchers described the challenges of “harnessing the therapeutic potential of extracellular vesicles (EVs),” which they noted are “potent mediators of intercellular communication.” The integration of EVs into engineered materials, though, has been challenged by scalability difficulties, among other issues.
To overcome those problems, “We leveraged EVs derived from yogurt whey, an abundant, low-cost alternative to cell-culture sources,” the researchers said.
And they discovered that EV hydrogels that started out in yogurt were biocompatible with the mice used in the study, and that new blood vessel growth in those mice began within a week. Those results “highlight the potential of agricultural EVs as both a research tool and a functional component of regenerative biomaterials,” researchers said.
A press release from the American Association for the Advancement of Science explained that EVs “are particles naturally secreted by cells” and that they “carry hundreds of biological signals, like proteins and genetic material, enabling sophisticated cellular communication that synthetic materials cannot easily replicate.”
