The general wound management market is a mature established business sector including both long-established product groups and more recently evolved approaches to wound management. The main components of the market may be summarized as follows:
Traditional wound care products. These include bandages, dressings and swabs made of generic cotton and textile fabrics.
Wound closures. This sector includes long-established devices including sutures and staples, as well as newly developed methods of wound closure such as tissue sealants and glues; also haemostatic devices to help arrest bleeding while closing the wound. These are mainly used in the surgical environment.
Advanced wound management products. These include dressings based on moist wound healing concepts (made of, biopolymers, hydrocolloids, composites, foam materials, films, etc). These are used mainly for chronic and slow-to-heal wounds. The sector also includes so-called active therapies including tissue engineered products, biomaterial composites, and new physical modes of activating wound healing, the latter having made major inroads into the marketplace within the past 2-3 years. Newly emerging classes of products in this sector include growth factors and angiogenesis promoters.
Consumer wound care. This sector includes a wide range of wound care products, mainly designed for wound closure and protection, and mostly for use in a first aid context.
Historically, wounds were treated with absorbent coverings that were designed to absorb the high levels of exudates produced from surgical, traumatic, or chronic wounds. These dressings delivered the benefit that they aesthetically covered up the sight of the wound, offered some absorptive capacity, and protected the wounds from getting dirty, offering some protection from infectious agents.
The ideal wound dressing achieves a number of goals. It should cover the wound and control odor; be conformable, mimicking the elasticity and stretch characteristics of skin, and yet easy to apply to the wound. It is now recognized that ideal wound dressings should control the fluid level at the wound surface in moist wound healing conditions, while absorbing excess liquid exudates. Wound dressings should also exclude infectious agents, and disinfect pathological levels of infectious agents. These dressings should require to be changed as infrequently as possible without detriment to the wound healing process, and acceleration of wound healing without scar formation is an elusive goal. Clearly a number of wound dressings with different attributes are required to address the wide variety of wound types, symptoms and the variability within any single wound.
Advanced wound care products are growing in use due to their ability to accelerate wound healing, a benefit readily perceived by physicians and healthcare providers for its better outcome and reduction in cost of care. Select advanced wound care products are growing at or near double digit rates, including hydrocolloid dressings, physical wound therapies (e.g., negative pressure) and growth factors.
The worldwide market for advanced wound management is the subject of the MedMarket Diligence report #S247, "Worldwide Wound Management, 2009: Established and Emerging Products, Technologies and Markets in the U.S., Europe, Japan and Rest of World," detailed at http://www.mediligence.com/
