Engineer Reinvents the Heal

THE SECRETS OF Jell-O may one day save your life.

The science behind the wondrous transformation of a liquid into a jiggly gel underlies the work that Srinivasa Raghavan, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, is doing with new materials that can treat wounds and deliver medications.

Raghavan is behind “Nano-Velcro,” a patentpending material based on chitosan, a polymer derived from the shells of crabs, shrimp and other shellfish. The material stops bleeding from minor cuts to acute wounds.

“By tweaking the chemistry of chitosan and attaching Velcro-like hooks, we can make it go from a material that weakly interacts with blood to one that coagulates blood,” explains Raghavan, director of the Complex Fluids and Nanomaterials Group in the A. James Clark School of Engineering.

Chitosan is commonly found in nutritional supplements and is believed to absorb fat. But Raghavan and colleagues working with viscoelastic substances that transform liquids into soft solids such as Jell-O found another use. Nano-Velcro could be used as a sponge bandage for profuse bleeding or as a spray that could substitute for stitches during minor surgical procedures. Unlike gauze, Nano-Velcro effectively stops bleeding and can be removed without peeling away the underlying skin.

“When we work with new kinds of materials, we try to make them at low cost and in a simple manner,” says Raghavan, the Patrick and Marguerite Sung Professor of Chemical Engineering. “Quite possibly people would consider our materials over alternatives for these reasons. And they work better.”

Joseph Schork, chair of the chemical and biomolecular engineering department, says Raghavan has “developed quite a reputation in his field” in the seven years he has been at Maryland. The Sung Professorship, the first awarded in the department, provides added resources to support his work. “These types of gifts help us to retain and attract more top-notch faculty like Raghavan who will enable our department to move to the next level in the chemical engineering community,” says Schork.

Raghavan works closely with doctoral student Matthew Dowling, who won the 2007 University of Maryland $50K Business Plan Competition. Raghavan serves as advisor to Remedium Technologies Inc., a company Dowling and fellow students founded to market Nano-Velcro.

The company is developing other applications for the modified chitosan, which include packaging it with proteins in a bandage that can be applied to minor cuts to expedite healing. This may be especially beneficial for diabetic patients whose wounds often take longer to heal. They expect to market the product in two years.

“If every emergency medical unit is equipped with Nano-Velcro, it would be very satisfying to know that we’ve actually made an impact,” Raghavan says.—MB

No Place Like Homes for Romanian Orphans

EIGHT YEARS OF work by College of Education Professor Nathan Fox have led to dramatic changes in how Romania deals with orphaned infants and children, who were once routinely warehoused in institutions.

Fox and colleagues from Harvard and Tulane universities created the “Bucharest Early Intervention Project” with a MacArthur Foundation Grant to follow a group of 136 children living in six different orphanages in the former communist nation.

“They got adequate nutrition, clothing, a roof over their head,” Fox says. But there was little “nurturing or sensitive and responsive caregiving.”

Large groups of infants lay in shared cribs, while young children aimlessly walked around. “We were struck by the significant deficits that the institutional children had across the board—in brain development, in social development and in cognitive or motivational development,” Fox says.

Under communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania pursued a plan to increase the nation's population. “The country was still very poor at the time,” explains Fox. “So there was a high rate of infant abandonment.” To take care of children that parents could not support, Ceausescu set up a series of mater nity hospitals and orphanages that remained after he was deposed.

The post-communist Romanian government knew it needed to help these children by making changes in its child welfare system but needed proof a Western-style foster care program could make a difference.

“Many children raised in orphanages in Romania are at dramatically increased risk for a number of social and behavioral abnormalities such as disturbances of attachment, inattention/hyperactivity, externalizing behavior problems, and a syndrome that mimics autism,” reports the Web site www.macbrain.org.

Fox and colleagues created a solution that had never existed in Romania—a foster care system. Under their randomized clinical trial, half of the children between 6 months and 31 months old went into supervised foster care homes. The rest remained in orphanages. For comparison, the researchers also identified a third group of infants in normal home settings.

After just four years, the results from the early intervention program were positive and dramatic. As a result, Romania set up its own foster care network to get the infants and young children out of institutions. Today, just 12 of the original 136 who started the study are still in Bucharest institutions. The rest are in foster care, back with their parents or have been adopted by relatives.

Fox says the researchers hope to win another grant to follow these children into adolescence and extend their work into Russia and the Ukraine. They have concerns that children who suffered from deprivation while in institutions will not be able to do as well making friends or establishing healthy relationships with adolescents of the opposite sex.—DO

Scared into Action

Illustration by Jeanette J. Nelson

ARE AMERICANS NUMB to all of the dire news reports on challenges we face? food safety, natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the threat of terrorist attacks? Despite intense public relations campaigns, most Americans have yet to prepare for such crises, and each new disaster amplifies scrutiny of the government’s approach.

A new study led by communication Professor Monique Mitchell Turner and her colleagues finds the best way to get the message across is by using scare tactics. Funded by a grant from the Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences, part of the National Science Foundation, Turner and her team researched the intersection between emotion and risk to find out how to best appeal to the public when it comes to emergency preparedness.

“It is critical for campaign message designers to understand how to communicate disaster preparedness messages that change attitudes and get people to take action,” says Turner, director of the Center for Risk Communication Research.

During the study, 390 participants listened to radio public service announcements using various appeals. Fear-based messages warned that food and water would be scarce, phone and power lines down and ATMs unavailable during a disaster. Angry messages told listeners terrorists would compromise security, careless people would start wild fires and insurance companies would not help.

Listeners judged their emotional reaction, risk perception, attitude and behavioral intention. Results from Turner’s research reveal that the fear appeals provoked the highest perceptions of risk, but overall, moderately intense emotional messages were the most effective in creating an impetus for preparedness behaviors. —MSE

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