Engineering Science and Materials Commons^™

Seaweed To Sealant : Multifunctional Polysaccharides For Regenerative Medicine And Drug Delivery Applications, Spencer Lincoln Fenn

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Pneumothorax, or a collapsed lung, is a serious medical condition resulting when air or fluid escapes the lung into the chest cavity and prevents the lung from inflating. Few viable means of sealing the damaged and leaking tissues are currently available, leading to longer hospital stays, multiple interventions, and increasing costs of care. The motivation of this dissertation is to engineer a novel polysaccharide-based therapeutic surgical sealant, which can be utilized to seal trauma-induced damage to the outer lining of the lung, i.e. pleura, preventing or reversing lung collapse to restore normal breathing function.

The use of polysaccharides, such as …