![]() ![]() They wondered if it might offer better healing than the standard wound dressings used in Brazil: silver sulfadiazine ointment or silver-impregnated sodium carboxymethylcellulose (NaCMC-Ag) foam. “Ninety-nine per cent of the Brazilian tilapia skin production is discarded, the chance of manufacturing a cheap alternative from this waste byproduct strengthened the idea too.”īorges recruited Odorico Moraes, a pharmacologist from Federal University of Ceará, and Edmar Maciel, a surgeon who specialized in burn injuries at the Burn Patient Support Institute, among many other researchers, to investigate tilapia skin for wound treatment. “He had the idea of using tilapia skin as a biological bandage to cover wounds,” said Carlos RK Paier, the preclinical R&D coordinator of the Tilapia Skin Project, in an email. One day, plastic surgeon Marcelo Borges read in his local paper about purses and shoes made from tilapia skin. While the entire country of Brazil only has four human skin banks, they have a lot of tilapia. The investigational group of more than 200 researchers studies the skin of the warm water fish Nile tilapia to make a wound dressing for burns and certain surgical procedures. Researchers at Brazil’s Tilapia Skin Project are also turning skeptics into believers. People just laughed, 'What, fish skin? C'mon!'” Tilapia make a splash in Brazilian hospitals “Fish skin is becoming a known thing in wound care,” said Sigurjonsson, but “I remember our first medical conference. With its FDA approval in 2015, doctors all over the world now use Kerecis’ fish skin graft to treat patients with chronic wounds. And think they're at home, so they start to divide and proliferate and make a new tissue,” Sigurjonsson said. “All these holes that used to be populated by fish cells, they will be populated by the patient's own cells. When a doctor applies the fish skin graft onto a wound, the human skin cells begin to proliferate into the fish skin, closing the wound. They then remove all the liquid from the skin and sterilize it. To prepare their cod skin grafts, the Kerecis team removes the scales and cells from the skin, which leaves holes where the cells were. They use arctic cod because the fish can be caught year-round, and because the fish are wild, they have not been exposed to any antibiotics or vaccines like fish from fish farms are, which might affect the human recipient. Kerecis uses the skin of wild Arctic cod caught off the coast of the small fishing town of Isafjordur, Iceland. “It's the same thickness, same elasticity, same porosity.” “The skin in the fish has epidermis, dermis, cutaneous layer, and so on, which is the same as in humans,” said Fertram Sigurjonsson, the founder and CEO of the fish skin biotech company, Kerecis. While fish and humans may be separated by hundreds of million years of evolutionary distance, it seems that skin didn’t change too much over the course of history. ![]() Arctic fish heal chronic woundsĮlectron microscope images of fish skin and human skin show that the two are quite similar. Fish skin, which would otherwise be thrown away when processing fish for food, also presents a sustainable treatment method that is accessible to communities around the world. Scientists and clinicians have used fish skin to treat intense burns and chronic diabetes wounds. Human skin for wound treatment is expensive, and to prevent disease transmission, it must be intensely processed with detergents that often remove many of the beneficial lipids that speed up healing.įish skin, with its surprising molecular similarity to human skin, low cost to obtain, and fast healing process, may be a better solution for treating some of the toughest wounds. ![]() ![]() During this process the recipient’s skin cells have a human skin scaffold on which to grow and differentiate, thus helping close the wound. The current gold-standard for healing serious wounds is a human skin graft. From Nordic cod to Egyptian tilapia, researchers around the world are studying the beneficial effects of fish skin for treating skin wounds.ĭamage to the skin can arise from any number of places: a deep cut, burn, or chronic wounds due to diabetes or limb amputation. The secret to wound healing may be swimming in the sea. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |