It was two years ago when I did my first interviews and wrote the original public story about novel glass fibers, a piece that startled many in the medical community. My ACerS Bulletin (‘Cotton candy’ that heals?; May 2011) was about a company, Mo-Sci Corp., that had leveraged research conducted at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (MS&T) and developed a unique and perhaps revolutionary medical product. Dubbed DermaFuse, this product is composed of a special formula of cottony borate glass nanofibers that appear to have a knack for healing deep, complicated, and long-standing wounds.

At the time, the “news” in the story was, first, that human studies—not just animal trials—had been underway among a small group of mainly diabetic patients at the Phelps County Regional Medical Center (PCRMC) in Rolla, Mo. The second news nugget was that seven of the 11 patients being treated with the borate fibers already had their wounds healed, with little scarring, at a speed equal to or faster than expensive state-of-the-art healing products and had been released from care. Moreover, the other four patients were well on their way to healing.