Amferia’s innovative, flexible hydrogel can be adapted to many medical applications. One of the first products we’re developing for our antimicrobial platform is a wound care dressing.

The soft, flexible Amferia antimicrobial hydrogel can be integrated with wound dressings of various shapes and sizes. The product we’re developing will be shelf-stable for up to eighteen months—and, when applied to wounds, will bind and kill bacteria for up to five days before dressings need to be changed.

Other potential treatments showing early promise include pre-surgery skin cleansing, spray-based products for wound care, and coatings for medical devices such as catheters and implants.

As antibiotics continue to be less effective against certain resistant bacterial strains, the potential market for this technology is enormous.

The potential market for this technology is enormous

Amferia’s hydrogel is a flexible solution that can be potentially adapted to multiple applications where killing bacteria is critical—with the added advantage that it kills even resistant bacteria. A few examples of potential applications are listed below. Some we are already developing. Others, we’re actively seeking partners to develop with us.

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Amferia’s first product for human care is our antimicrobial hydrogel wound dressing. Amferia is developing several dressing formats that feature our patented hydrogel, starting with a non-adhesive hydrogel dressing for acute wounds, while pipeline products cater to the numerous needs within wound care while keeping the antimicrobial property intact.

When applied as a solid wound dressing pad, Amferia’s antimicrobial hydrogel can bind and kill 99.9% of bacteria, providing an effective, clean environment for wound recovery.  

The global advanced wound care market is estimated to be 7 billion USD today and growing at a rate of 5% annually.

Amferia’s proprietary hydrogel acts as the contact layer to the wound, binding and killing bacteria while providing a moist environment conducive for wound healing.

Today, Amferia has ongoing clinical investigations in Europe and we are seeking CE marking and FDA clearance on this product.

The global advanced wound care market is estimated to be 7 billion USD today and growing at a rate of 5% annually.

Another potential application for Amferia hydrogel comes in the form of a patch that can clear the skin of bacteria before a surgical procedure. A recent study we conducted on human skin demonstrated that Amferia hydrogel kills up to 99.99% bacteria on skin surface within the first three hours of application.

Adhering a protective hydrogel patch to the incision site prior to surgery eradicates skin flora, providing a bacteria free site of surgery. In emergency wards, where patients may be waiting in a non-sterile environment prior to surgery, a bacteria-killing patch can reduce complications and potentially save lives.

The flexible nature of our hydrogel platform allows us to apply the patented bacteria-killing hydrogel in many forms—including an aerosol spray. Small particles of the antimicrobial hydrogel can be dispersed through an aerosol to cover broader areas of the skin and wounds. A pipeline product being developed at Amferia is a spray that can be applied directly to wounds or skin, especially deep wounds with high bacterial presence.

The spray system enables the same antimicrobial mode of action as the wound dressing while ensuring high surface area, which will enable eradication of bacteria from deep and uneven wounds.

This scientific basis for this product has been evaluated scientifically and published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Short-term implantable medical devices such as urinary catheters are widely used in hospitals and nursing homes to relieve urinary retention and incontinence.

In these types of medical devices, the most common and life-threatening complication is catheter associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI), which affect over 10 million patients every year with high economic cost and patient suffering. Antimicrobial resistance has made it difficult to treat CAUTI via conventional antibiotics.

With an increasingly ageing population and rising costs to treat CAUTIs, a strong need exists for innovative anti-bacterial catheters that prevent bacterial colonisation on the catheter walls.

In collaboration with Chalmers University of Technology, Amferia has begun ongoing research into enabling our technology as a whole catheter or as coatings to existing catheters. The base technology, amphiphilic antimicrobial hydrogel may be developed into tough silicone-like materials or can be tailored as coatings to silicone surfaces. Both these prospects are being tested today as proof-of-concepts and published in scientific articles.  

Amferia is interested to engage in discussions with companies who have business interest in utilising our innovation in possible product combinations through partnership structures. Within wound care, Amferia has the possibility to offer finished or semi-finished products for commercial or distribution partnerships.

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Please contact: Saba Atefyekta, Sales Director and Co-founder

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Amferia is working in partnership with a manufacturer to produce a high volume of Amferia wound care dressings. Amferia currently operates a clinical production site in Mölndal, Sweden, for testing and evaluating these products. Informed by those results, we are building capacity for a high volume production of wound dressings with an established partner.  

Over time, harmful bacteria continue to evolve. In what is rapidly becoming a health care crisis, many bacteria have already developed antibiotic resistance (ABR). Simple infections such as skin wound infections can become lethal. Today, across the world, many types of bacteria have evolved to an extent where none of our antibiotics are effective against them.

For example, Methicillin Resistant Staph. Aureus (MRSA) evolved from an ordinary bacteria. It has become what’s known as a “superbug,” resistant to many common antibiotics. A skin infection involving MRSA can develop life-threatening complications. MRSA is only one of many superbug strains. At current rates of microbial evolution, WHO warns, drug-resistant infection may kill more people than cancer by 2050.  

Innovations such as Amferia’s focus on addressing antibiotic resistance through relying less on antibiotics and more on the roles of good hygiene, education on antibiotic use and smarter antimicrobial technologies that do not increase the risk of new resistance. 

Using bio-inspired materials derived from our immune system to kill bacteria comes with numerous advantages. These materials can target bacteria without harming our own cells. They offer potent local action at the site of an infection, with no leaching into the body or environment.

In this context, Amferia’s innovation and wound care dressing is more than a plaster, but rather a new platform that aids and supports the mitigation of antibiotic resistance.