E-Magazine: Dasia Taylor: Creator of the Infection-Detecting Sutures
Dasia Taylor: Creator of the Infection-Detecting Sutures
Surgery is a common medical procedure that impacts countless lives on the daily. From an emergency appendectomy to a complicated craniotomy, sutures are utilized to repair lacerations, or cuts that are a result from the surgery. A successful operation shows no indication of infection or inflammation after the surgery has been completed. Unfortunately, becoming infected after a surgery has taken place is more common and prevalent than you may think.
The cost of surgeries are notoriously known for being exceedingly expensive and the addition of becoming infected introduces yet another layer of uncertainty and financial burden. On a mission to relieve patients of these burdens, 17-year-old Dasia Taylor from Iowa is working on introducing a more efficient approach to discovering infections in their early stages.
Dasia has created color-changing sutures that are equipped with the ability to determine infection at the site of the surgery. Infections can often contribute to fatality if proactivity is absent. This is a problem for all patients regardless of socioeconomic status, but patients in developing countries are more likely to die due to the lack of resources when infections do occur.
The molecular-level explanation of Dasia’s creation can be explained in surprisingly simple terms– the 17-year-old states that, “When you have an infection, there’s chemical imbalances going on, and my stitches pick up those chemical imbalances, and then they change color because of what is going on”. Pending patent application, Dasia is currently making use of natural products to produce the color alterations. She uses sutures that have been dyed with beet juice, which is a natural indicator, Dasia explains. If the site of a surgery begins to have chemical imbalances, the natural acidity will decrease, which will cause Dasia’s sutures to change from a bright red to a grayish-purple color.
Dasia goes on to explain that the idea for this medical innovation came to her during her junior year Chemistry class. Dasia’s creation serves as proof that creativity and ideas can strike at any moment and can possibly be used to save the lives of countless people in the future.
To learn more about Dasia and her medical innovation, visit this link: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/17-year-old-black-girl-makes-color-changing-sutures-that-detect-infection
-Sriya Sirigireddy