Title : Tilapia skin as A dressing: Challenges and updates
Abstract:
Introducing fish skin as a biological dressing for treating burns and wounds holds great promise, offering an alternative to existing management strategies. The histological characteristics of fish skin and human skin are similar. The fish skin contains a high amount of collagen, making it a suitable biomaterial for tissue engineering. Fish skin perishability still poses the most enormous preservation difficulty. It must be kept chilled or frozen; even then, it has a very short shelf life. Therefore, most clinical practices have used fish skin grafts in fresh form for wound and burn management, but this would not have happened without prior sterilization. The standard sterilization technique must eliminate harmful pathogens but maintain the structural and biochemical properties that could compromise the dressing function. However, most of these sterilization methods neglected its effect on collagen integrity and amount. Moreover, the need to sterilize fresh Tilapia skin directly before medical use in clinics or hospitals seems impractical to physicians. Therefore, in this presentation, we will present the efforts of our research team in selecting the optimal sterilizing agent for fresh tilapia skin that is safe to collagen and effective against bacteria. Furthermore, the research team developed a method for preserving the tilapia skin for a long time in lyophilized, sterilized vacuum-packed patches, ready for immediate use in clinics and hospitals after rehydration in normal saline for just 5-10 min.
