Patching It Up: Bandages For Canker Sores
Researchers are working on a novel treatment for canker sores, and it might be as easy to use as an adhesive bandage.
You can feel it coming—that slight burning sensation in your mouth that means a canker sore is on its way.
Canker sores, also called oral or mouth ulcers, are annoying and painful. There are few good treatments, so most people are left waiting them out. And as they occur three or four times per year, on average, and last up to a week, people can spend a month out of every year impacted.
Soon, a novel treatment may change all that. Xiaohua Liu, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the Texas A&M University Baylor College of Dentistry, is developing a bioadhesive patch to treat oral ulcers like canker sores (or to be technical, aphthous ulcers). A bioengineer by training, Liu hopes that he and his team can create a product to deliver medication more efficiently.
“What we’re trying to develop is a patch that has the drug pre-loaded into it, so that we can control how the medication is released and we can be very specific about where it goes,” Liu said. “We designed the patch with a multiple layer structure so that we can force the drug to be released onto the site of the oral ulcer.”
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