Now, however, scientists have incorporated curcumin – a compound extracted from turmeric – into a porous foam that's designed to heal skin wounds with a minimum of scarring.

Being developed by a team at Switzerland's Empa research institute, the "Scaravoid" foam is composed mainly of a biocompatible, biodegradable polymer with a three-dimensional scaffolding-like microstructure.

When a slim piece of the material is inserted into a wound, the body's adjacent cells naturally migrate into it and proceed to reproduce, gradually replacing the polymer with natural biological tissue (shown in brown against the white foam, in the image below).