Hydron Technologies Inc has received a Notice of Allowance from the United States Patent and Trademark Office for a patent application covering a new tissue oxygenation technology for improving current medical treatments and quality of life for burn victims, diabetics, wound care and post-surgical patients, organ transplant recipients, and those suffering from pressure ulcers (bed sores). The patent, expected to issue within the next several weeks, could have far reaching impact in these and other medical fields, as well as OTC and cosmeceutical skin care.
The Company's super-oxygenation technology makes possible the delivery of pure oxygen through the skin to tissue depths considered therapeutic for wound healing and the maintenance of tissue viability. Using topical application, oxygen can now be targeted at specific problem areas and delivered into skin and tissue that is not receiving sufficient oxygen from the bloodstream, essentially oxygenating from the outside in.
Tissue oxygen deprivation is common in a wide variety of medical conditions. For burn victims, treating damaged tissue with super-oxygenation early, in the acute phase of injury, could help reduce tissue loss and the need for skin grafting, and may help to minimize scarring. For diabetics, it could obviate the need for many of the 82,000 amputations related to tissue oxygen deprivation that occur in the U.S. each year.
This technology dramatically elevates available oxygen levels beneath the skin without the use of a hyperbaric chamber. Studies performed at the University of Massachusetts demonstrated an increase in tissue oxygen levels beneath intact skin, and in one test achieving oxygen levels above those found in the arterial blood.
Charles Fox, who heads Hydron Technologies' product development and who was formerly Director of Research and Development for Warner Lambert, notes that "the application of super-oxygenated compositions to oxygen deprived tissue, damaged by burns or wounds, could significantly enhance tissue survival and regeneration. Super-oxygenation technology uses micro-bubbles in therapeutically appropriate fluids to introduce pure oxygen at a partial pressure high enough to penetrate tissue. This is significantly different from existing products or treatment methodologies," explained Fox.