Opportunities for Surgical Sealants, Glues and Hemostatic Agents

In the field of surgical sealants, glues, wound closure and anti-adhesion, the most significant opportunity for products is the area of high strength glues. Currently, there is no standout biologically or chemically based product that has the performance necessary to displace the very large and established market for traditional wound closure — sutures, staples and clips. Fibrin-based surgical sealants, glues, hemostats and other products are at best adjuncts to traditional wound closure, providing a complementary role of helping to seal wounds or hasten the healing process. The real opportunity of fibrin or other surgical sealants and glues lies in their ability to provide the tensile strength of sutures with rapid hemostasis and tissue adhesion and with no toxicity or other biocompatibility effects beyond what sutures might produce. Secondly, such future sealant/glue products must also be able to achieve this performance at lower cost and/or improved outcomes.

So, this is no small challenge.

Having said this, there are quite a number of companies active in the development of these products and it is eminently reasonable that the companies involved will be making significant inroads to this challenge over the coming decade.

Even at existing levels of performance, biological and other sealants/glues/hemostats are progressively gaining caseload and market share from traditional wound management products. The forecast below, which illustrates shares for the market in 2009, imputes a modest level of penetration of traditional products. Any significant advance in improved tensile strength, with reduced toxicity, of emerging sealants/glues/hemostats would result in the market growth rate eclipsing the modest 11.5% CAGR in the data below.