Amputations can be the result of severe trauma, or an aggressive disease.
But the vast majority are caused by chronic wounds, injuries that fail to heal.
Many chronic wounds are linked to diabetes, high blood sugar levels causes nerve damage
and poor circulation making it harder for wounds to heal.
They can then become infected which sometimes leads to amputation.
Currently one in 11 Americans suffers from diabetes.
By 2050, it could be one in four.
Some wounds are treated with skin from pigs, or human cadaver.
However, both involve a high risk of failure and disease transmission.
It’s led to an unlikely discovery.
I was interested in finding a source of material that was as similar to human skin as possible.
And the surprising thing is that cod fish skin is much more similar to human skin
than for example pig skin.
A chemist by trade, Fertram Sigurjonsson has spent his career treating
chronic wounds
Now, as CEO and founder of Kerecis he’s turning cod skins into medical products in
north west Iceland.
Our facilities are located in the township of Isafjordur, thirty miles from the Polar
Circle.
This is a fishing town.
Fish is caught and processed in a fish processing plant and we collect the skins.
These are just landed this morning or last night.
They’re fresh.
This one is rejected.
I’m examining for blood.
A lot of time blood will bleed into the skin.
And looking for parasites, looking for holes.
I don’t like that one either.
This one is looking pretty good, yeah this is a nice beautiful one.
Doesn’t have holes, blood spots, no tears.
Once the best skins are picked, the Kerecis team get to work on transforming them into
medical grafts
The first step in our manufacturing is to de-scale it.
We want to remove the scales from the material.
Then we put the skins into a solution that cleans the skins and gently removes all cells.
And then we move it into our clean room where we remove all the liquid from the material
gently while preserving the three dimensional porous scaffolding structure of the materials,
which is very important.
It’s too small for the human eye to see, but this is what Kerecis says is vital to
accelerating the healing process.
The cell structure of the fish skin recruits the body’s own cells to form healthy tissue.
It’s then gradually incorporated into the closing wound.
Across the Ocean, in New York’s Mount Sinai hospital Dr. John Lantis has been using Kerecis
products on his patients.
This is actually what the material looks like a week after being put on.
The outline of the fish skin is actually around the outside here.
This is fish skin that is not active on him.
The rest is fish skin deeper in the wound.
So far so good.
It looks like it's coating the wound nicely and filling in the way that it's supposed to
because prior to that it was hard for my skin inside the wound to knit itself back together
Once Dr Lantis has cleaned out the wound he applies a new Kerecis graft.
It’s not known exactly why the fish skin works.
In a recent test conducted by Kerecis, the company compared pig skin to fish skin.
The Kerecis fish product closed the wound significantly faster.
The first three months of 2017 Kerecis sold as much as they did in the the whole of 2016,
and that growth isn’t just thanks to doctors working with diabetic patients.
Significant investment has come from the U.S. military.
It can be applied immediately to a burn wound, just after extraction from the battlefield.
Then it serves as a cover.
It reduces pain and it's antimicrobial, so it prevents infections.
The fish in these waters have given a lot to the people of Iceland.
Sustenance and wealth.
With Kerecis products costing up to a thousand dollars, what was once a byproduct fed to
farm animals, could now be the most valuable part.