The Body Already Makes This Gas — Texas A&M Researchers Are Now Using It to Heal Wounds

A bandage-like device that delivers hydrogen sulfide directly to chronic wounds is showing early promise at Texas A&M's College of Veterinary Medicine. The research has clear implications for diabetic wound management in animals and eventually in veterinary patients.

By Vet Candy Editorial  |  June 2026  |  Research, Surgery & Wound Care

Chronic wounds are one of those clinical problems that look simple until they aren't. A small cut, a blister, a surgical incision — in a healthy patient with good circulation, these close. In a diabetic patient, or any patient with compromised peripheral blood flow, they can become open, infected, and devastating.

Researchers at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences are working on a new approach to this problem — and the molecule at the center of it is one the body already produces naturally.

Hydrogen sulfide, delivered directly to wound tissue through a bandage-like device, is showing early promise as a way to increase local blood flow and support healing in wounds that have failed to respond to conventional treatment. The research is preclinical, but the mechanism is sound, the translational potential is real, and the veterinary implications are worth unpacking.

Why Chronic Wounds Fail to Heal

The core problem in non-healing wounds is circulation. Healing requires oxygen, nutrients, immune cells, and growth factors to reach damaged tissue — and all of those things travel in blood. When peripheral circulation is compromised, as it is in diabetic patients and those with ischemic disease, the wound site is essentially cut off from the resources it needs.

Current standard-of-care approaches — wound cleaning, infection management, specialized dressings, negative pressure wound therapy — address the wound environment but don't directly fix the underlying lack of blood flow. For many patients, that's the missing piece.

"In many of these patients, the body just isn't getting enough blood to the wound to support healing," said Dr. Cristine Heaps, interim head of VMBS' Department of Veterinary Physiology and Pharmacology. "People are losing limbs to wounds most of us would never think twice about."

Where Hydrogen Sulfide Comes In

Hydrogen sulfide is an endogenous signaling molecule — the body produces it naturally, and it plays a role in vascular regulation. At physiological concentrations, it promotes vasodilation (relaxing and widening blood vessels) and angiogenesis (the formation of new blood vessels). Both of those effects increase blood flow to tissue.

Therapeutically, that's exactly what a non-healing wound needs. The challenge has always been delivery: systemic administration of hydrogen sulfide causes blood vessels to widen throughout the entire body, which can drop blood pressure to dangerous levels and create serious side effects.

"If that effect happened throughout the entire body, your blood pressure would drop too much because your vessels would all widen at once," Heaps said. "By keeping it localized, we can target the wound without affecting the rest of the body."

The device the Texas A&M team is developing with Exhalix, a company focused on vascular health and wound healing technologies, addresses this by applying hydrogen sulfide topically — directly to the wound surface through a specialized coating that generates controlled amounts of the gas on demand. Early findings suggest the gas stays concentrated at the wound site rather than distributing systemically.

Combining with Negative Pressure Wound Therapy

The research isn't just about hydrogen sulfide in isolation. The team is also investigating how the device performs when combined with negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT) — currently one of the most widely used interventions for chronic wounds, which uses controlled suction to remove wound fluid and promote healing.

The combined approach sequences the two therapies: hydrogen sulfide is delivered for a set period to act on the wound vasculature, then suction is reintroduced. The hypothesis is that priming the wound with improved blood flow before applying NPWT could produce outcomes neither approach achieves alone.

"We're using our device in combination with negative pressure wound therapy to see if we can improve outcomes beyond what either approach can do on its own," Heaps said.

If the combination approach holds up in further studies, it would be clinically significant — NPWT is already widely used in both human and veterinary medicine, and a complementary therapy that improves its efficacy would have a ready implementation pathway.

The Veterinary Angle

This research is coming out of a veterinary medicine college, and the translational pathway runs in both directions. Diabetic wounds are a recognized clinical challenge in veterinary patients — particularly in cats with diabetes mellitus, where peripheral neuropathy and impaired healing create a risk profile similar to what's seen in human diabetic patients. Wound management complications are also relevant in post-surgical recovery, trauma cases, and pressure wounds in recumbent large animal patients.

Hydrogen sulfide-based wound therapy isn't coming to your clinic next year. The research is explicitly described as preclinical and has not yet been evaluated in human patients, let alone veterinary patients. But the mechanism — improving local perfusion at a wound site without systemic effects — is directly applicable to the kinds of non-healing wounds veterinarians manage, and the fact that this research is happening in a veterinary medicine department means the species translation question is already on the table.

Dosing optimization is the current focus. The team is working to establish the best concentration and delivery frequency for maximum benefit — which is exactly the kind of foundational work that needs to be done before clinical application becomes possible.

What to Watch For

The published research from this group appears in the Journal of Biological Engineering. As the preclinical work matures, the questions that will determine veterinary relevance are whether the device can be adapted for animal wound geometries and coat/skin characteristics, what the dosing parameters look like across species, and whether the NPWT combination approach shows additive benefit in controlled studies.

If those questions get answered favorably, a localized hydrogen sulfide delivery device for non-healing wounds would fit into a real gap in veterinary wound management — particularly for diabetic cats, post-surgical complications, and large animal recumbency wounds where conventional approaches frequently fall short.

Worth tracking.

Read the Research

Published paper: A novel device for in-situ on-demand hydrogen sulfide generation and delivery to increase tissue perfusion to chronic wounds — Journal of Biological Engineering

Texas A&M VMBS — Department of Veterinary Physiology and Pharmacology: vetmed.tamu.edu

Exhalix (device development partner): exhalix.com