Most wound treatments that use growth factors work by flooding the area and hoping for the best. Large doses of manufactured protein go on as a spray or cream, and most of it degrades or drifts away before reaching the cells that need it.
Researchers at Imperial College London built something that inverts the logic. Their dressing carries no drug at all. Instead, it grabs the growth factors the wound is already producing, holds onto them, and lets go only when a repair cell physically pulls on the material.
