Drexel testing a wound-healing device

Albert Hicks has a problem that plagues many diabetics: a disc-shaped wound on the sole of his foot that is taking ages to heal.

He and his doctor at the Drexel University College of Medicine's wound-healing program have been working on it since April. It looks as though they are making progress, but it is surprisingly hard to tell.

A big man who works in construction, Hicks is helping Drexel researchers test a device that uses light to measure how well diabetic wounds are healing.

Ultimately, it could help doctors make better choices among the expensive alternatives for treating chronic wounds: hyperbaric oxygen, skin substitutes, growth factors, and negative-pressure wound healing, said Michael S. Weingarten, a vascular surgeon who heads the wound-healing program and has worked for five years to develop the monitor with a team from Drexel University's School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems.

Their machine, which was nurtured by the University City Science Center, was recently licensed for sale by a Florida company. It is the first project to be licensed after being funded by the science center's QED program, which began in 2009 and helps bridge the gap between academic research and commercialization.

David Kolb, whose background is in investment banking, liked the machine enough to build his company, Emunamedica, around it. He saw opportunity in a country that spends $11 billion to $15 billion a year on wound treatments but little on diagnostics. The device under development offers a noninvasive way of looking deeper under the skin than current methods and lets doctors identify problems earlier.

"We looked at a bunch of different things," Kolb said. "Our goal was to find something that could be a game-changer for patients, for docs, and even for insurance companies."

The Drexel device uses near-infrared light to measure the oxygenation of blood near chronic wounds. Such wounds are constantly inflamed and tend to have higher levels of blood oxygen, said Elisabeth Papazoglou, an associate professor at the biomedical engineering school, who came up with the idea for the monitor.

A wound that is healing should show lower oxygenation levels over time, Josh Samuels, a second-year doctoral student at Drexel, said as he passed a small wand over Hicks' wound. There are a few device competitors, but most doctors now can only look at the wounds and measure them. Hicks' was about 2.8 by 3 centimeters. That is imprecise and can also be misleading.