As reported by Fast Company, last Wednesday the FDA gave medical device clearance to a product called Traumagel that’s designed to prevent bleeding and is basically a real-life version of Halo’s Biofoam. Only instead of coming in a camo-green cylindrical canister, it comes in a stimpak-looking plastic dispenser, “a 30-ml syringe of an algae- and fungi-based hemostatic gel that’s the color and texture of hummus.”
Traumagel is designed for the kind of severe bleeding that follows a bullet wound, which would otherwise be treated with a product like QuickClot, a gauze that’s soaked in a chemical clotting agent, or good old-fashioned superglue, like in that one episode of Poker Face.
“If you have a roll of gauze, you have to pack that into a bullet wound inch by inch, and you have to ensure it’s making contact with whatever’s bleeding,” said Joe Landolina, founder of Traumagel creator Cresilon. “It’s painful for the patient and it’s dangerous because it can expose an EMT or emergency physician to shrapnel or shards of bone. [Traumagel] finds its way to where it needs to go.”
Before being approved for use on humans Traumagel was used on injured animals under the name Vetigel. If it’s good enough for your cat it’s good enough for you, which is the excuse I use to explain why I ate cat biscuits as a kid. Anyway, Landolina went on to say, “Ninety-one percent of battlefield mortality is due to preventable hemorrhage. Which means if there were only a better product to stop bleeding, lives could be saved.”
It’s not quite the stimpak that instantly heals a broken leg in Fallout 3, or the FPS medkit that restores you to perfect health simply by walking over it, but it’s surely only a matter of time, right?