"IT STARTED as a little sore near my knee, probably a mosquito bite," says Elizabeth Loboa. But the antibiotic ointment wasn't working, and within two weeks what was one wound had become three. From the looks of the wound, her doctor suspected the superbug MRSA and prescribed powerful last-line oral antibiotics. It was at that point that the temptation just became too great. "Instead of taking them, I decided to test a treatment I'd been developing – on myself," she says.
Loboa wasn't just any patient. In her lab at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, the materials engineer had been cooking up a special kind of self-destructing super-bandage capable of healing infected wounds quickly, without scarring or standard antibiotics.
At the heart of Loboa's superplaster is a material that degrades until nothing is left but your own, newly regenerated, healthy cells. What's more, the same trick could one day ...
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