Box Jellyfish kill more people worldwide each year than sharks. That’s why a team of researchers from the University of Hawaii at M?noa are working to develop an effective first aid treatment for the jelly’s deadly toxins — and they’re trying just about everything. From the popular myth of urinating on stings to vinegar/hot water immersions and commercial cures like StingNoMore, no remedy out of bounds. But how do you test these treatments without trying them on humans? You make your own synthetic skin, obviously.
“What we needed were innovative models which would allow us to test how different options might affect the severity of a sting without putting anyone at risk,” Angel Yanagihara, lead author of the paper, said in a statement. “So we designed a set of experiments using live, stinging tentacles and live human red blood cells which allowed us to pit first-aid measures against one another.” The team wound up suspending red blood cells in an agarose gel and covered them with lanolin-rubbed sterile porcine intestine for their experiment.
via Engadget
