Ms Victoria Giblin

Burns and chronic wounds affect hundreds of thousands of people each year in the UK and can lead to serious physical and psychological harm. Faster healing not only improves outcomes for patients but also reduces the burden on healthcare services.

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This project explored whether a naturally occurring sugar — 2-deoxy-D-ribose (2dDR) — could be added to common wound dressings to speed up the development of new blood vessels (angiogenesis), a key step in the healing process.

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What this project set out to explore

With support from a Blond McIndoe Pump Prime Award, this lab-based study investigated whether 2dDR could be combined with Jelonet® — a paraffin-impregnated gauze dressing widely used to manage burns and wounds.

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Working between Sheffield Teaching Hospitals and the University of Sheffield, the research team tested how well 2dDR could be loaded into the dressing, how reliably it could be released over time, and whether it would stimulate blood vessel growth in lab-based models.

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They used the CAM (chorioallantoic membrane) model, a well-established method for studying angiogenesis, to compare the effects of 2dDR-loaded dressings with controls.

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What the team found

• Silicone rings loaded with 2dDR stimulated significantly more angiogenesis than controls in the early stages of the CAM model.

• It was possible to load 2dDR into Jelonet® using paraffin oil, although the sugar was released rapidly (within 24 hours). Future versions of the dressing will aim to extend this release to better suit real-world dressing change intervals.

• Dressings containing 2dDR produced more new blood vessels in the CAM model than standard Jelonet®, suggesting that 2dDR supports wound healing.

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Why this matters

This is the first study to demonstrate that 2dDR can be delivered from a widely used, low-cost dressing like Jelonet®. The findings support further work to optimise the formulation and delivery, with the goal of producing an affordable, effective dressing that could benefit patients around the world — including in lower-resource settings where access to advanced wound care is limited.

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The wider impact

Developing dressings that promote faster, more effective healing has the potential to improve quality of life, reduce complications, and lessen demand on overstretched healthcare systems. This work also highlights a promising alternative to expensive and unstable growth factors like VEGF, which have shown limited success in wound healing.

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Next steps

The next phase of the research will focus on improving how 2dDR is loaded into Jelonet®, aiming to control the rate of release over a 3–4 day period — the typical timeframe between dressing changes. This will allow the team to identify the release pattern that leads to the best angiogenic response.