Small doses of silver can actually help heal your wounds faster?? We mustn’t let this information get out to the werewolves of the world. Shhhhhh.
You know the UV-ink rubber stamps that night clubs like to stick on your skin? Well, a novel silver nanotech variant of the idea could actually help heal your skin wounds more quickly.
Silverware became popular centuries ago partly because it was a precious metal and thus a status symbol, but also because the health qualities of silver have been known since Roman times. Back then wealthy folks even gave their kids a silver spoon to suck on to ward-off the plague (hence the saying). Modern science understands how silver has anti-bacterial qualities, but the trick in delivering silver accurately into a wound nowadays is getting the dosage right since silver is toxic in high concentrations. That’s what research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is tackling, with a novel delivery approach for silver nanoparticles.
The research team has perfected a way of delivering silver nanoparticles onto skin in a layer just a few molecules thick—thereby forming an excellent barrier but not over-dosing the region and killing skin cells—by borrowing a technique that’s long been used to apply ink in molecule-thick layers: Rubber stamping. The polyelectrolyte multilayer coating, mixed with micrometer-sized beads of silver nanoparticles (which the team found was the most efficient way to ensure delivery) was “assembled” on a rubber stamp and was then placed on wounds from cadaver skin to test its efficiency.
