A Battle-Ready Sponge

Something simple, quick and cheap — that’s the formula Kenton Gregory ’76 (ENG) ’80 (MED) used to create his sponge-based wound dressing for hemorrhaging soldiers. On the battlefield, medics face harsh conditions with limited resources and little time to save lives. Blood loss remains the leading cause of death in active combat, so Gregory knew his solution had to work fast.

“Everything that’s complex would fail in the battlefield,” he says.

Traditional gauze can take several minutes to apply and is difficult to use in areas like the armpit or groin. Gregory’s sponge-based dressing, placed inside a syringe, expands in just 15 seconds to seal a wound, buying medics precious time to evacuate the wounded safely. The mini-sponge hemorrhage control dressing is now saving limbs and lives from grievous artillery and drone wounds in Ukraine daily.

But this simple invention doesn’t just save soldiers. In low-resource countries, the same technology can help women survive postpartum hemorrhages, which are the top cause of maternal death worldwide. In Ethiopia, for example, women are at higher risk of dying due to limited resources and access to urgent care — as much as 14%. At the University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, Zambia, medical personnel assist up to 30,000 live births yearly — and 1 in 20 of these mothers experience postpartum hemorrhage. There, Gregory’s sponge was used on nine women, all of whom survived. The entire procedure, from opening the package to stopping the bleeding, averaged 60 seconds, much faster than drugs typically used.

Gregory first thought of the sponge in 2008, but his innovations go back further. After 9/11, he partnered with the military to develop chitin- based wound dressings. “I was showing it for the very first time in a medical meeting in an airbase in Florida,” he recalls. “They looked at me and said, ‘We’re going to need this.’”

A chemical engineer and physician, Gregory always wanted to merge his engineering skills with medicine. He’s founded seven companies and worked in lasers, tissue engineering and pandemic preparedness as a Bill Gates Fellow. Now, he’s developing AI tools that utilize cellphone ultrasound signals to aid in diagnosing pneumonia in areas with limited radiology services. Pneumonia still kills thousands of children under five every year.

Gregory is currently developing an inexpensive, AI-guided, tablet-based ultrasound for the Center for the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. It is an early detector of smoke-inhalation lung injury, abdominal bleeding and severe extremity injury at the site of mass casualty events.

Despite his inventions, Gregory doesn’t care for business management. “My gift is in inventing,” he says. “That’s what I love to do the most.”

He hopes to keep designing simple, life-saving tools for the world’s most vulnerable — from soldiers in battle to mothers in rural clinics. “I always think about what’s going to make the biggest difference for my patients,” he says. “Where can I help save the most lives?”

Published in the Autum 2025 issue of Trojan Family Magazine