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THURSDAY, April 1 (HealthDayNews) -- A new material, produced by bacteria, dramatically speeds skin healing in burn victims, a study has found.

The material is called bacterial cellulose, said Wojciech Czaja, a research associate at the Technical University of Lodz in Poland, who presented the findings this week at the American Chemical Society's annual meeting in Anaheim, Calif.

Czaja's study included 20 burn patients treated with the new material, and 12 "control" burn patients treated with traditional wound dressings.

"Certain strains of bacteria use glucose to make cellulose," Czaja said. "We remove the bacteria from the cellulose, leaving only the cellulose."

"It's totally different than cellulose from plants," he said, and when it's made into wound dressings it has definite advantages. "It has the ability to hold a large quantity of water or liquid. You can supply an antibiotic through the dressing because it is porous. It's also transparent."

"For second-degree burns, we think this is the best," Czaja said.

Second-degree burns are typically caused by scalding injuries, flames or a hot object, resulting in blisters, deep redness, a burn area that may look wet and shiny, or skin that's painful to the touch, according to Children's Hospital Boston.

With the new dressing, he said, there was a "dramatic acceleration of the whole process of healing. At day 10, seven treated with bacterial cellulose had epidermis (skin) growing already. That's pretty fast."

In comparison, only three patients with the regular dressing showed growth of epidermis at day 10, he said.

According to Czaja, bacterial cellulose promises many new applications in wound care beyond burn treatment, including the care of surgical wounds, bedsores and ulcers.

To call the treatment "revolutionary" is not exaggerating, said R. Malcolm Brown Jr., the Johnson & Johnson Centennial Chair in Plant Cell Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. The new dressing, he said, "holds 95 percent of its weight in water."

That allows for what experts call "moist healing," considered a healthier way to heal.

In another presentation at the same session, Gonzalo Serafica of Xylos Corp. in Langhorne, Pa., discussed his company's new bacterial cellulose material, called XCELL, which has been available since January 2003.

Compared to cellulose from trees and cotton, the biosynthesized cellulose fibers are about 200 times smaller, creating a material up to 100 times more absorbent, according to the company.

More information

To find out more about bacterial cellulose, visit the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. For more on burns and treatment, visit the University of Kansas.

(SOURCES: R. Malcolm Brown Jr., Ph.D., Johnson & Johnson Centennial Chair in Plant Cell Biology, Section of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, University of Texas at Austin; Wojciech Czaja, Ph.D., research associate, Institute of Technical Biochemistry, Technical University of Lodz, Lodz, Poland; March 31, 2004, presentation, American Chemical Society annual meeting, Anaheim, Calif. )

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