Imbed Biosciences gets FDA green light to market its wound dressing

Imbed Biosciences gets FDA green light to market its wound dressing

Imbed_logoImbed Biosciences, located at University Research Park, received clearance from the FDA to market its Microlyte Ag product for prescription and over-the-counter use. Microlyte Ag is a wound dressing that uses small amounts of silver to kill bacteria, helping the wound heal.

UW-Madison spinoff gets FDA OK for bacteria-killing wound dressing

By David Tenenbaum, UW-Madison

Imbed Biosciences today received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to market its patented wound dressing for human use. The dressing it calls Microlyte Ag is a sheet as thin as Saran Wrap and can conform to the bumps and crevices of a wound, says company CEO Ankit Agarwal.

The dressing is now cleared by the FDA as a class II medical device, for prescription and over-the-counter use.

Like many dressings now used to treat burns and other persistent wounds, Microlyte Ag contains silver to kill bacteria – but in much smaller quantities.

“Silver is an excellent antimicrobial agent,” says Agarwal, a co-founder of the company in the Madison suburb Fitchburg, “as it is active against a broad range of bacteria and yeast. But the large silver loads found in conventional silver dressings can be toxic to skin cells. Our dressing uses as little as 1 percent as much silver as the competition, and yet the tests we submitted to the FDA showed that Microlyte kills more than 99.99 percent of bacteria that it contacts.”

This chronic pressure sore on an Irish wolfhound received conventional treatment for more than three months at the UW–Madison School of Veterinary Medicine.

That kill ratio even appeared in tests against some of the nastiest hospital-acquired superbugs, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant enterococcus. Read more …