Burns improve more rapidly after treatment with fish skin — SkimNews
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- Study of 465 adults across 49 burn centers between 2019 and 2025 found that patients given Kerecis's GraftGuide fish skin spent 12 fewer days in hospital on average (23 days vs. 35 days) than those treated with approved synthetic collagen substitutes before skin grafts.
- Complication rates were twice as high in the synthetic-substitute group (16% vs. 8%), with issues like sepsis more common among patients receiving standard collagen scaffolds.
- Kerecis, the Icelandic company that makes GraftGuide from wild Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua), funded the study but did not analyze the data; its fish-skin products are already approved for burns and other wounds in the US and UK.
- John Lantis at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai attributed the benefit to omega-3 fatty acids in cod skin, which he said trigger a brief inflammation spike that stops bleeding then fades — a pattern he called exactly what doctors want.
- Atlantic cod skin does not require harsh detergent processing because very few fish viruses affect humans, preserving the omega-3 content that would otherwise be washed away.
- Fiona Wood at the University of Western Australia cautioned that comparing equivalent patients who received different treatments is 'always difficult' and called for formal head-to-head trials.
- An ongoing head-to-head trial is testing GraftGuide against grafts on second-degree burns, with each patient receiving fish skin on one part of the burn and a graft on another so they serve as their own control.
Why it matters: For burn patients facing skin grafts, cod-skin temporary wound coverage cut total hospitalization from 35 to 23 days on average and halved the complication rate from 16% to 8%, potentially reshaping pre-graft protocols — though experts like Fiona Wood still want formal head-to-head trial data before wider adoption.
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