2023-12-18 16:58:51
It is a French technological and medical feat: a dressing made from marine worms saved a severe burn victim.
This is a first: a serious burn victim was saved thanks to a dressing made from marine worms. A medical and technological feat all the more impressive as the patient’s case was desperate.
Last summer, a 33-year-old man was seriously injured when his boat exploded on the Loire. His body is 85% burned to the deep second degree and third degree, details Le Télégramme. And his vital prognosis is in jeopardy: despite his admission to the burn unit of the Nantes University Hospital, the skin does not scar and his condition worsens.
“There is a rule among burn victims,” explains to RTL Franck Zal, doctor in biology and founder of the Hemarina biopharmaceutical laboratory which designed this innovative dressing. “If the addition of the proportion of surface burned with age exceeds 100, we consider that there is almost no chance of saving him. This person was doomed.”
Especially since the situation offers few treatment solutions: the burnt body surface is such that there are not enough areas of skin that can be removed for a graft.
“In this patient, in order to limit the surface to be grafted and therefore to be taken from the rare unburned areas, we opted for this dressing in order to try to heal the thorax, abdomen and back without surgery, making it possible to preserve the graft donor sites for the hands and lower limbs”, indicates to 20 minutes Pierre Perrot, head of department of the Nantes burn center.
Many therapeutic perspectives
The hospital decides to contact the French biotechnology company Hemarina, which has designed an innovative dressing using sea worm hemoglobin. No worm in the dressing but a protein from arenicola marina, often called bloodworm, present on the beaches of the Atlantic and the English Channel and known for its great oxygenation capacities.
“We were in the middle of summer, we had to call back our employees to manufacture and supply the 330 110 cm2 dressings which were necessary to treat the patient,” Franck Zal tells Ouest France. Concretely, the dressing comes in the form of a syringe containing a gel spread over the wound. Which provides “controlled and targeted oxygenation, continuously on the wounds”, according to the Nantes University Hospital.
The results are spectacular: the healing process resumes and following three months of hospitalization, the patient is transferred to a specialized rehabilitation center. Results that would almost be miraculous: the patient’s abdomen, back, neck and upper buttocks returned to the way they were before the accident.
If to date around ten patients have benefited from this innovation – including one patient who was thus able to avoid a hand amputation – “this case is exceptional”, enthuses the founder of Hemarina. “This is a major technological breakthrough in the field of wound healing,” he adds.
A treatment which allows us to imagine numerous therapeutic perspectives, particularly for foot ulcers in diabetics or even pressure sores.
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