New Gel Stops Severe Bleeding in Seconds

This transcript has been edited for clarity. 
Robert D. Glatter, MD: Hi and welcome. I’m Dr Robert Glatter, medical advisor for Medscape Emergency Medicine. Joining me today to discuss a novel, plant-based approach to stopping moderate-to-severe bleeding is Joe Landolina, CEO and co-founder of Cresilon. Welcome, Joe. 
Joe Landolina, MS: Thank you so much for taking the time. It’s great to be here.
Glatter: It’s a pleasure to have you join me, and I want to congratulate you on your recent 510(k) FDA clearance for your novel product to save lives and stop bleeding. To begin with, can you explain how the idea for launching your company came about? 
Landolina: The way that Cresilon came about was a little bit unorthodox, because I was 17 years old when I invented the technology behind the product that eventually became Traumagel®. 
My grandfather was an ex-pharmaceutical executive, who later in life started a vineyard. I grew up on a vineyard with a winery chemistry lab across the street from my house and a grandfather who learned lab safety in the 60’s. So, that meant that the day I learned how to walk, I was tossed into a lab and I fell head over heels in love with lab research.
That started experimentation and my academic pursuits. That led to discovering a blend of two plant-based polymers derived from algae that stop bleeding on contact, effectively creating a mechanical barrier and allowing anything from a gunshot wound to anything quite a bit more minor to stop in a matter of seconds.
Glatter: Your background is in biomedical engineering. How is it that you started tinkering and doing all this type of work? 
Landolina: That’s correct. I did my undergrad in chemical engineering, and my graduate studies were in biomedical engineering. For me, that was supposed to be a pathway into medical school. I always wanted to be a surgeon myself, and I love the field of medicine. 
As a freshman in college at NYU Engineering, I had this idea. I entered it into NYU’s business plan competition, and we won at the engineering school. That gave us just enough capital to start developing and researching Traumagel more, and Cresilon was born out of that research.
Glatter: In terms of stopping hemorrhage, which takes so many lives in the United States and globally — certainly, uncontrolled hemorrhage — what are the techniques that you see, prior to the arrival of your product, as being effective? Can you elucidate some of these techniques? 
Landolina: In emergency medicine, the primary mode of controlling hemorrhage is passive. It’s what, in Brooklyn, we like to call “pressure and a prayer”, where you have a material that’s either gauze or an impregnated gauze in most cases, where the mode of action is absorbing blood, with the adjunct of pressure by the first responder or by the clinician who’s providing aid.
The idea is to stop the flow of blood to concentrate blood factors at the surface of the gauze product, and to promote either platelet activation or the production of fibrin to create a clot. 
These types of technologies are widespread. There are many versions of this technology carried by EMS agencies, trauma bays, US military soldiers, and soldiers across NATO countries. But these types of technologies tend to be relatively inefficient, meaning that they’re very difficult to get into wounds because of the gauze or the powder form of the devices, and it’s very hard to get them in contact with the form of bleeding.
On top of that, if the patient is clotting compromised or immunocompromised in some way, the ability to create a durable clot that will not be ripped off when you remove the product at the next level of care is also of concern. And so, this type of technology or the type of treatment of massive hemorrhage hasn’t changed in decades.
Glatter: I envision this product will be carried by paramedics, used on the battlefield at some point after your FDA clearance, and recently it went through.
Do you see any possibility that this could be an AED equivalent to Stop the Bleed? In other words, could the average lay person be trained to use your product if kits are available? 
Landolina: To be very clear, Traumagel today is only approved or cleared under a “prescription-only” indication, which means that it will not initially be available OTC. However, that is our goal. Our goal is to make this product available and usable by someone with no medical training whatsoever. 
The form factor of being a gel in a syringe lends itself well to that, meaning that we try to make it as easy as point and shoot to control hemorrhage, where there’s not as much technique to be learned in the application of a product like Traumagel as there is in current hemorrhage control techniques. 
Glatter: Once you apply Traumagel, can you explain what happens to the product after it’s applied and the bleeding has stopped? Does it get reabsorbed by the body? What’s the process here? 
Landolina: Under Traumagel’s indication, because it’s used in traumatic injury, it must be removed within 24 hours.
One of the big benefits of Traumagel is that when the patient produces a blood clot underneath Traumagel, it doesn’t become incorporated within the gel itself. To contrast that with the use of gauze, gauze is porous. The clot ends up wrapped around the fibers of the gauze, so if you peel the gauze away, it’s very likely that clot is coming off with it. The surgeon or the clinician at the next level of care is going to have to deal with the re-bleed. 
You can remove Traumagel cleanly and entirely without disturbing the underlying clot. That’s a major benefit, not only to the patient but also to the next level of care, to the next clinician or physician that is required to remove the product.
Glatter: How is it possible to remove the substance without disturbing the clot? Can you explain in more detail? 
Landolina: That’s one of the hallmarks of these plant-based polymers and the way that we design Traumagel itself. Traumagel is completely nonporous, and it has no fibrous nature to it. What that means is when the patient produces a blood clot or fibrin next to or on top of Traumagel, that fibrin ends up not incorporated within the polymers of Traumagel itself. 
Over time, because Traumagel is a hydrogel, meaning that by weight it’s mostly water, you end up having less adhesion to the clot over time. When it’s time to remove Traumagel from the injury, it has lost almost all of its adhesive capabilities, meaning that when you peel it away, that clot is going to stick better to tissue than it will to the gel itself. 
Glatter: Can you explain a little bit about the matrix that’s formed, the physiology, and how the polymers work to form this matrix? 
Landolina: Sure. Traumagel is made of two polysaccharides that are plant derived. One polysaccharide is polyanionic, and the other is polycationic, meaning one has negative charges and the other has positive charges, which together create almost a Lego block effect, where when the material comes in contact with tissue, it adheres strongly and allows for itself to effectively create a mechanical barrier against bleeding.

Courtesy of Cresilon, Inc.
Even in the face of major arterial blood flow, Traumagel will stay where it needs to stay, and it’s not going to get washed away. This means that it is much more easily appliable to these types of surfaces and will allow the patient to produce their own endogenous fibrin clot at that location.
Like I mentioned before, when that fibrin clot is formed, because the gel itself has no pores or fibers, it doesn’t become incorporated within the fibrin clot. You can take the gel away, leaving that clot behind without the chance of a re-bleed.
Glatter: In terms of bleeding itself, have you tested your product with major aortic bleeds or carotid bleeds in preclinical work?
Landolina: We have used the US military’s model for lethal hemorrhage, and the idea there is to create a model that is just that — lethal. These are the worst types of bleeds that you can possibly imagine, where the patients are clotting compromised, and where you have, in most cases, a very strong arterial component, so something like a femoral artery bleed.
We’ve also tested in carotid artery, aortic applications, as well as combinations of venous and arterial bleeds. The idea here is to show the use of the product in the absolute worst-case scenario so that when this translates into the clinic, the models that we’ve used for evaluation, hopefully, are worse than what actually rolls into the trauma bay.
Glatter: Excellent. What’s the mean time to stop an arterial vs a venous bleed? Are we talking a matter of seconds?
Landolina: In the case of a healthy patient, meaning a patient without clotting compromise, you’re in a matter of seconds. It’s less than 10 seconds. 
In the case where you have clotting compromise, a deep, complicated wound geometry, we recommend holding a pressure bandage on for 3 minutes just because it increases the chance of Traumagel coming into contact with the bleed, especially when you can’t visualize the bleed in the bleed source. Because of that pressure time, that becomes the mean. But again, it’s highly dependent on the type of bleed and the style of application.
Glatter: As a segue to that, what is the failure rate based on your studies and internal research using Traumagel? Have there been cases where bleeding has not been able to be stopped? 
Landolina: It depends on the study, but the failure rates are incredibly low with Traumagel, assuming that it’s correctly used. That’s one of the benefits to this product, where with proper technique, with overwrap with gauze, you nearly always get control of hemorrhage with a product like this. 
Glatter: Is manual pressure required in that sense? From what you described earlier, manual pressure would not be required. 
Landolina: It depends on the injury. What we recommend is that, if you have a very deep wound where you cannot visualize the source of bleed, you use pressure to seat Traumagel into the source of bleeding, meaning that you’re following Committee on Tactical Combat Casualty Care (Co-TCCC) regulations or requirements, where you’re over wrapping with gauze, and you’re providing a pressure wrapping to ensure that the Traumagel is in contact with the bleed while it’s doing what it’s doing. 
In most cases, it doesn’t hurt to apply pressure on top of Traumagel as well. In more surface level bleeds, you don’t need pressure at all. 
Glatter: Interesting. In terms of further applications (eg, nose bleeds or GYN bleeding, which are life-threatening), do you see this coming as an application for the future? 
Landolina: That’s where we’re working. Traumagel is the successor to an animal health product called Vetigel. The formulations of the gel behind Vetigel and Traumagel are identical. Vetigel has a full surgical indication, and that’s everything from epistaxis to neuro and spine procedures, into cardiovascular and soft tissue surgeries, orthopedic medicine, and so on.
Cresilon’s goal is to eventually expand the indication of our technology to include surgical indications and other indications where we can help any patient that’s bleeding. 
Glatter: That’s important, because we use prehospital whole blood, low titer, specifically, when patients have life-threatening hemorrhage. With your product, that would reduce the amount of blood products that would need to be administered. This could be a real game changer. 
Landolina: Definitely, that’s the goal we’re working on. 
Glatter: In terms of any risk for infection, has that been studied as well? Does Traumagel in any way lead to increased rates of infection?
Landolina: Traumagel is biocompatible. It’s a sterile product. We’ve done the full suite of biocompatibility testing as required by FDA. On top of that, remember that Vetigel, which is the same formulation, is an implantable product. As a result, that has even extended biocompatibility testing beyond what would be necessary for an external product.
In Vetigel’s use case, which has been used now in over 60,000 patients, primarily companion animals, dogs and cats, we haven’t seen instances of infection. There’s no reason to believe that we would see that clinically with Traumagel.
Glatter: In terms of other research that your company’s embarked on preclinically, I understand there were some studies done at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. I was wondering if you could expand on these, specifically, in terms of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and hemorrhage related to that. For example, with shrapnel or even a gunshot wound. 
Landolina: The Walter Reed collaboration with Cresilon is something that I’m particularly excited about, because it marks Cresilon’s first project that’s outside the scope of just hemostasis. Walter Reed came to us with this proposal where there’s a big challenge in a subset of TBI called penetrating ballistic-like brain injury, where the brain has been penetrated by a bullet, shrapnel, or some other projectile, and there’s an injury that exposes the brain to the outside. 
Today, there is no standard of care to treat patients with those types of injuries. In many cases, mortality is caused through swelling of the brain, or collapse of the brain. What they came to us with was the potential of using our technology, not primarily as a hemostatic agent, but to be able to stabilize that patient enough to get to the next level of care to be treated by a neurosurgeon.
That study Walter Reed did was just a pilot that was done in small animals. In that pilot, they showed that over the period of treatment, there was no negative change in vital signs, no increase in edema or in swelling, or in any of the biomarkers that were being monitored at that time. 
At the very least, this is not full indication that this indication will work for Cresilon, but it shows that there’s promise. It’s something that we’re working on and hopefully we’ll be able to bring to market soon.
Glatter: Certainly, maintaining intracranial pressure and cerebral perfusion pressures are very critical. In the future, do you think this product would be able to be deployed endovascularly? Imagine this in terms of stopping bleeding from some source, whether it’s from a stroke or another intracranial source. 
Landolina: That’s been an area of interest for us. We have no evidence to prove that indication works at this point, but there’s also nothing to say that it wouldn’t be possible for our technology. At this point, we’ve only looked at a cursory level at those indications. 
Glatter: Does the use of Traumagel obviate the need for a more definitive repair (eg, with sutures) or something that’s more permanent?
Landolina: I always say that Traumagel — and Vetigel, for that matter — is not a replacement for good surgical technique. The surgeon always needs to make his or her best judgment when reviewing the patient. That doesn’t mean that there won’t need to be sutures or vascular repair in most of these cases, especially in major trauma.
Glatter: Do you have some bullet points or pearls you could give our audience as a takeaway? 
Landolina: When Cresilon looks at Traumagel — and for us, Traumagel is the next generation of hemostatic agent, especially in trauma care and in emergency medicine — it allows for a far-simplified application of the product and much faster control of hemorrhage with better patient outcomes.
As we roll this out through EMS agencies, trauma hospitals, military agencies, and eventually to the general public through a future indication, it’s something we’re very excited about. Personally, I started this business 14 years ago, and so it’s great to see our mission of saving lives transitioning to saving human lives.
Glatter: I look forward to seeing this product in the emergency department, but also in other settings, such as in the operating room where we can really help patients who are dying from hemorrhage, certainly on the battlefield, and the lay public. If someone were to come upon a patient who’s bleeding out, this could be certainly a game changer and a lifesaver. 
I want to thank you for your time. This is a really important product that’s transformed the lives of so many animals, but also people in the future. 
Robert D. Glatter, MD, is an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell in Hempstead, New York. He is a medical advisor for Medscape and hosts the Hot Topics in EM series. 
Joe Landolina is the CEO and co-founder of Cresilon, a biotechnology company specializing in plant-based solutions for emergency bleeding control. Driven by a passion for biomedical innovation from a young age, Landolina invented the technology behind Traumagel, a groundbreaking gel that stops severe bleeding on contact. He began developing this life-saving product at 17, inspired by early lab experiences on his family’s vineyard and a background in chemical and biomedical engineering from NYU. Under his leadership, Cresilon secured FDA 510(k) clearance for Traumagel, making it one of the first plant-based hemostatic agents available to medical professionals.