These teens saw things that needed fixing and did something about it

Inventor: Dasia Taylor

Age: 17

Infection-Detecting, Color-Changing Stitches

Sometimes people get cuts and injuries that require stitches. And sometimes, despite our best efforts to keep those stitches clean and slathered in antibiotic ointments, those stitches get infected.

When Dasia Taylor was 17, the Iowa high schooler read an article about how there was a kind of stitches — known as “sutures” (soo-churs) in medical terms — coated with a special kind of material that can sense important changes in a wound (through electrical impulses). The “smart” sutures could then send that info about wound temperature, infection, and so on to doctors and patients. That’s all well and good in the United States, Dasia thought. But what about in developing countries, where people can’t afford such an expensive thing? What about places where technology isn’t so advanced?

She also learned that in in low- and even middle-income countries, 11 percent of surgical wounds get infected. (In the United States only two  to four percent of surgical stitches get infected.) Ta-da! Dasia landed on the topic for her science fair project. She used beet juice (yep, borscht!) to dye surgical thread, developing a kind of stitches that change from bright red to dark purple if a wound gets infected. That was in 2019, and she won several regional and state awards for the project. But it didn’t end there. This past year, she became a finalist in America’s most prestigious science and math competition, the Regeneron Science Talent Search.

The science behind her stitches is actually kind of simple: It’s all based on pH (how much acid is present in a solution). Human skin has a pH of around five. If a wound gets infected, the pH rises to around nine. “I found that beets changed color at the perfect pH point,” Dasia says. (Beet juice turns from bright red to dark purple at a pH of nine.) “That’s perfect for an infected wound. And so, I was like, ‘Oh, okay. So, beets is where it’s at.’ ”

From there, she tested different stitching materials to see which kind of sutures would hold the dye best. She’s hoping that these color-changing stitches will soon be working for patients in developing countries, too. That way, they can get medical help as soon as possible, rather than waiting until an infection becomes very serious. The idea still requires a lot of research and development, and Dasia is waiting for her patent. Nevertheless, it’s a project that can’t be beet.