Far Forward Burn Treatment
It is anticipated in future conflicts that the Army will have to fight and win across multiple domains in contested locations where air, ground, and nautical evacuations of casualties will be extremely challenging. Evacuating casualties within theater may take days or weeks. Additionally, the explosive weapons that will likely be used against US forces will be more powerful than what has been used to date, resulting in higher numbers of casualties with significant burn injuries including larger, more severe burns. Only minimal burn wound management tools are available in the pre-hospital environment, consisting primarily of silver-containing wound dressings to prevent/minimize infection until the casualties’ expedient evacuation to the San Antonio Military Medical Center Burn Center for definitive treatment. Unfortunately, the future burn casualty may not have the benefit of the early evacuation to the burn center that was available during recent conflicts. As such, there is a significant need to push burn treatment capabilities much farther forward in order to begin burn treatment as early as possible. By closing the time gap between burn injury and burn treatment with solutions that can be reasonably provided by non-medical personnel (i.e., buddy care) or medical first responders (e.g., medics) in a pre-hospital setting, morbidity and mortality rates can be significantly decreased.
The Government is seeking burn interventions that are simple and effective enough to be used in a pre-hospital setting. These tools will need to enable providers from the point of injury through Role 3 Hospital Centers to treat severe burn injury for up to several weeks post-injury. It is imperative that these solutions be simple enough that non-licensed medical providers (e.g., medics) can administer them, and effective enough to decrease morbidity and mortality rates and improve outcomes over current in-theater burn treatment options.
It is expected that multiple burn treatment solutions will be needed, and may be used in concert with one another, to provide the needed burn treatment capabilities in theater. These solutions will need to address the following: burn conversion prevention, infection prevention, non-surgical debridement, and temporizing coverage/dressings that protect the burn wound and may promote early healing. Technological advances that contribute to product solutions that meet these requirements will be considered as possible candidates for fielding by the Burn Treatment Skin Repair acquisition program, which is managed by the Burn Treatment Skin Repair (BTSR) Integrated Product Team (IPT). The research project award recipients were selected from the Offerors who responded to MTEC’s Request for Project Proposals (21-02-FFBT).
Far Forward Burn Treatment RPP
Project Team: Critical Innovations
Award Amount: $1.89M (additional cost share = $226K)
Project Duration: 24 months
Project Objective: Succor™ is a novel, field-expedient, self-setting hydrogel wound dressing to provide temporizing cover, infection prevention, and healing support for large burn wounds. This product is the world’s first antibiotic-eluting foaming hydrogel that self-sets to provide local drug delivery, making it an ideal dressing for the treatment of large and severe burns in the far forward environment.
