Solutions Explained

Mauritian researchers build a leishmaniasis wound patch from sugarcane waste

Cutaneous leishmaniasis scars close to 1 million people a year, and the open ulcers it leaves often become infected because the dressings used on them are generic, not built to fight the bacteria that colonise a wound staying open for months. A team at the University of Mauritius has built a new one out of sugarcane fibre, the country's oldest industrial waste product.

The University of Mauritius campus at Réduit, Moka.

Generic dressings do not fight the bacteria that infect leishmaniasis ulcers

Sandflies carry the Leishmania parasite. Where it settles in the skin it produces lesions that open into ulcers, spread slowly over weeks, and often leave lasting scars on the face, arms, and legs. The infection itself is treated with antiparasitic drugs, a field that has had decades of research attention. The open wound left behind has had far less. Dr Marie Andrea Laetitia Huët and Prof Archana Bhaw-Luximon, who leads the Centre for Biomedical and Biomaterials Research at the University of Mauritius, wrote in a 2022 review in Royal Society Open Science that most dressings used on these ulcers were designed for other wounds and adapted afterwards. They are not built to fight the bacteria that colonise a lesion staying open for months in a patient whose immune system is already under strain from the infection, which is why these wounds get secondarily infected and take longer to close than they should.

Sugarcane bagasse moves from fuel to biomedical feedstock

Sugarcane has been grown in Mauritius since the seventeenth century and still covers most of the island's cultivated land. Crushing the cane for juice leaves behind bagasse, a fibrous pulp that makes up roughly a third of the weight of every tonne milled. For decades the main use for that pulp has been fuel: Mauritian sugar mills burn it to generate electricity, and bagasse-fired power plants supply a meaningful share of the island's grid.

Turning agricultural waste into biomedical material is part of a wider shift in biotechnology, one that treats crop residue as a chemical feedstock rather than a disposal problem. Bagasse is largely cellulose and lignin, two natural polymers that most industries either burn or discard. Cellulose gives plant material its structure. Lignin binds plant cell walls together and carries antimicrobial properties of its own. Both can be extracted and rebuilt into other materials. A country that already produces bagasse in bulk starts that research with a raw material already on hand, in volumes a country without a sugar industry would have to import or synthesise.

How the patch is built

The team, whose results appear in the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules, tested the hydrogel loaded with each of five bioactive compounds in turn: eugenol, the active compound in clove oil, berberine chloride, ursolic acid, amphotericin B, and ginkgo biloba extract. Of the five, the eugenol and berberine chloride loadings produced the strongest antibacterial effect against the strains tested. The team also recorded anti-inflammatory activity and faster proliferation of fibroblasts, the cells that rebuild connective tissue as a wound closes. The dressing is built to manage the open wound and the bacterial infection that complicates it, not to kill the parasite that causes the disease in the first place.

The dressing has been tested in mice, not yet in people

The researchers tested the dressing on a murine model, under ethics approval from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. No human trial has been registered. Speaking to SciDev.Net in July 2025, before the animal results were published, Dr Huët put commercialisation within a few years if testing held, with manufacture in Mauritius and first deployment across Africa.

Guidance in that region is being revised on a similar timescale. The Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative reported in March 2026 that new World Health Organization recommendations covering leishmaniasis in Eastern Africa are expected during the year, with Kenya, Ethiopia, and Uganda revising national guidelines alongside them.

A Mauritian knitwear manufacturer funds the antibacterial testing

Dr Huët's doctorate was funded by a fellowship from the Higher Education Commission of Mauritius. The antibacterial studies at the centre were funded by Kendall Tang and RT Knits Ltd, a knitwear manufacturer based in Mauritius, through the purchase of equipment and consumables, credited by Prof Bhaw-Luximon in the study. The patch is mounted on a textile support, so the manufacturer's fabric-making capability sits inside the product itself, not just behind it as a source of funding.

Dhanush Jamadgni, a doctoral student in Prof Martin Thuo's group in the United States and a co-author on the paper, spent February 2025 at the Mauritian centre working on surface modification of wound dressings through the COMPASS programme. He wrote afterwards that the visit taught him "good science does not need to be expensive."

Prof Kavi Kumar Khedo, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Mauritius, described the wound patch as an academia, industry, and health collaboration, and said the centre is in contact with the Ministry of Health over adoption of the dressing. "Research cannot be done only by our own academics," he said. "We need to rely a lot on those partnerships."

He credits the equipment at the centre for making the work possible on the island at all. "The CBBR is very well equipped with all the biotech equipment," he said, "and that is unique in Africa." The university has reinvented itself before, moving from an agricultural school at independence in 1968 to schools built around textiles, tourism, and finance as each industry rose. "We have been called a developmental university," he said. "We have accompanied the development of Mauritius in each of those phases."

He is recruiting more than 40 academic staff with doctorates this year to widen the research base behind projects like this one. "I believe that our people is the most important asset," he said, "and investing in the people now today will yield a lot of benefits for the future."

"Our goal is to produce the tool locally in Mauritius," Dr Huët told SciDev.Net, "with initial deployment across Africa."

Khedo frames that kind of outcome as the model he wants more of the university's partnerships to reach. He wants agreements that go beyond paperwork. "It should be accompanied not by intention only, but by at least one concrete project that has already been agreed upon, where the finance has already been cleared, and there is a concrete implementation plan with a timeline," he said.

Institutions in this article: University of Mauritius, Centre for Biomedical and Biomaterials Research, University of the Witwatersrand, RT Knits Ltd, Higher Education Commission of Mauritius, World Health Organization.