Researchers from Iceland to Brazil investigate the healing powers of fish skin, providing a low-cost and improved solution for treating wounds.
The secret to wound healing may be swimming in the sea. From Nordic cod to Egyptian tilapia, researchers around the world are studying the beneficial effects of fish skin for treating skin wounds.
Damage to the skin can arise from any number of places: a deep cut, burn, or chronic wounds due to diabetes or limb amputation. The current gold-standard for healing serious wounds is a human skin graft. During this process the recipient’s skin cells have a human skin scaffold on which to grow and differentiate, thus helping close the wound.
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.
Fish 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. Scientists and clinicians have used fish skin to treat intense burns and chronic diabetes wounds. 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.
Silence Of The Clams.