Blood Glue

The skin-grafting operation was a bloody business. Each new stitch to hold the big skin-patch in place added to the bleeding and decreased the chances of a take--oozing blood may keep a graft from sticking. A masked woman by the table, Belgian-born Dr. Machteld E. Sano, was thinking fast as she watched the needle. And she got an idea: why not "glue" a graft in place with such animal-chemical substances as are used in tissue culture (TIME, June 13, 1938), such stuff as keeps bits of chicken heart and other organs alive outside the body?

Dr. Sano went back to her tissue-culture laboratory at Temple University's School of Medicine and set to work on rats. To make her glue, she took some heart's blood from the rat to be grafted, mixed it with heparin to 'keep it from clotting, separated the cells from the blood plasma, put the plasma in the icebox. She shook the cells up with a special salt solution, separated the salty liquid and kept it, threw the cells away. She calls the salty fluid her "extract." The plasma plus the extract constitutes her glue.

Rat Skins. Dr. Sano grafted skin on rats' chests or the napes of their necks, the areas that move the most. She first removed a small piece of skin from the test area and waited four days for healing to start. For grafting, she used a bit of skin from somewhere else on the same rat. As if using a new patent glue, she painted plasma on the grafting area, extract on the under side of the graft. Then she put the graft in place and held it a while with warm, wet cloths.

Just after an operation, ordinary skin grafts slip over the tissues beneath; but Dr. Sano's grafts stick so tightly that even a gentle pull with forceps does not move them. For a dressing she uses vaselined gauze topped with a cork ring (not so tight as to hinder circulation).

In 48 hours, she says, such a graft is pink and traversed by tiny veins from the tissue below. "The procedure has resulted in 100% takes."

Dog Livers. When Dr. Sano announced her glue last July in the American Journal of Surgery, it was already being used successfully on Temple University Hospital skin-graft patients. In Science last week, she and Surgeon Clarence A. Holland made a new announcement:

Plasma and extract mixed together can be used to save bloody stitches on a liver cut by a bullet, a blow or an operation. The doctors tried it on dog livers first, now use the method on people. The raw surfaces are painted with the mixture and held together about three minutes. Any spot still bleeding or unstuck is repainted. As with skin-grafting, results are 100% successful: "By the end of ten days, it is often difficult to find the line of incision without a microscope."*

The plasma-extract mixture "gives definitely superior results" in mending spleens too, but "due to the intrinsic structure of the spleen itself," does not always succeed.

The glue need not necessarily be made from the patient's own blood. Anyone's blood will do. But the patient's blood is usually easiest to get.

Dr. Sano hopes her method may be used in the treatment of war wounds.

*Dr. Sano says that cut livers will stick together fairly well without her glue but are likely to come apart because of bleeding. Her glue stops bleeding.

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