Bandages made out of tilapia skin have been used to successfully treat third-degree burns on the paws of two black bears in Southern California, according to a recent installment of the “Here and Now” radio news report.
The bears had been injured while traversing the charred grounds of Los Padres National Forest in the wake of a devastating wildfire. Among the team of veterinarians tasked with helping the bears was Jamie Peyton, chief of the integrative medicine service at UC Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital, who recalled a story circulating one year prior that detailed the work of a research group in Brazil using tilapia skin to heal human burns.
"I remembered hearing about a story — about a year ago, a research group down in Brazil started using tilapia for [human] burn victims down there, and I thought, 'Well that might be a really interesting solution for us because we don't have banks of skin for animals,'” Peyton told Here and Now's Peter O'Dowd.
The noted healing properties associated with tilapia skin, as well as its accessibility, were two of the major driving factors spurring the veterinarians forward with such an unorthodox treatment, explained Peyton.
“Tilapia skin has all those properties and it's really easily accessible. So accessible, it was literally going down to the local fish market and finding fish. And then putting together a protocol to sterilize those fish and get them ready and put on the patients,” Peyton said.
The bears, one of which was pregnant, were sedated so the team of animal doctors could apply the tilapia skin bandages to their paws. Because of the pain relief offered by the bandages, the bears made no attempts to remove them, as perhaps a dog or cat might, said Peyton.
The treatment experiment was a bigger success than the team had originally imagined, Peyton said.
“I definitely think it was a bigger success than we had anticipated,” she said. “Anytime you try a new idea, you're always hopeful, but it's an experiment in some ways where you're trying to see, 'Is this going to help?' And it definitely did. The first time that bear stood, and she hadn't been standing in a couple weeks, I thought, 'Oh, my God. This is great.' And then seeing the wounds heal much faster time than we anticipated."
As of now, Peyton and other researchers within the medical field are looking into the use of fish skins for treatments of various ailments.
“The research that's been done down in Brazil, and also a couple other groups have been looking at the properties of fish skin itself, and what they've found is it has a very high level of collagen, and specifically tilapia has higher levels of type I and type III collagen, which you need to act like sort of a scaffold or matrix that allow the cells to kind of cross over that wound and help heal it properly. So right now we're going to be looking at other fish skin as well, but we knew from their research down there that it was helpful," Peyton said.
