Challenges and Solutions for Treating Complicated Wounds: Result of a Feasibility Human Pilot Study

Burn, diabetic, and pressure wounds are debilitating and serious clinical conditions that cause major health complications for patients, caregivers and health care providers. The cost of treating these conditions worldwide is at least $25 billion per year. Despite all advancements made in this field, current therapies have neither improved the healing outcomes of these wounds, nor decreased their prevalence. This is mainly because conventional skin grafts, scaffolds, and even sheets of skin substitute are ineffective due to the their inability to fill up all void spaces seen within these wounds. Thus, these patients have an increased rate of morbidity and prolonged hospital stays due to wound infection and treatment difficulties. For this reason, a new strategy for treating these difficult-to-heal wounds is needed to ease patients’ suffering and reduce the socio-economic burden associated with these wounds.To address the aforementioned difficulties, we have recently developed a shelf-ready collagen based powdered, reconstituteable liquid skin substitute called MeshFill. It is made of natural skin proteins and remains liquid at low temperature and solidifies within 20 minutes of application to the wound site and thereby filling up all voids and cavities within wounds from bottom up.We have already shown that, when MeshFill is applied to delayed wounds in a diabetic mice and autologous meshed skin grafts on pigs, it fills up all cavities and generates a nutritional environment for skin cells from the edge of their wounds to migrate within and on the surface of the resultant scaffold and accelerate the healing process with a significantly better clinical outcome. In a human pilot study, we have also shown that some deep pressure ulcers and surgical wounds can be treated with Liquid MeshFill with a very promising results. Being: 1) Powder to be shipped to any place, 2) Liquid to fill up all cavities, 3) Nutritional for skin cells to migrate in and proliferate, 4) Cost effective and its easy use makes MeshFill very effective in improving non-healing wounds in general and pressure and diabetic wounds in particular. In this presentation, the challenges and solutions for treating non-healing wounds in general and pressure ulcers in particular will be outlined. Funding: This study has been supported by a grant from the Canadian Institute of Health Research and iCORD Seed grant.