Wexner Center uses spray-on skin for burns
A March motorcycle crash in Hocking County sliced Brad Ricart’s liver open and left him with a deep gash from one hip to the other.
As a result, the 31-year-old underwent more than 18 surgeries during a 48-day stay at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center.
On top of all that, the skin on Ricart’s abdomen kept dying, leaving him with a basketball-size wound.
The solution? Spray-on skin cell technology.
“I’ve been floored with the results just because of its ability and how it reacted to my skin and how it adhered,” said, Ricart, who lives in Italian Village. “It’s crazy.”
The Wexner Medical Center is one of three hospitals in the state and the only one in central Ohio that is using the Recell Autologous Cell Harvesting Device, which helps grow replacement skin cells that can be sprayed on burns. It can also be used in reconstructive and cosmetic skin procedures.
The technology has resulted in faster healing, officials say, and less scarring than traditional skin grafts.
“It can allow for us to cover very large wounds with very little skin that grows over time,” said Dr. Ian Valerio, a plastic surgeon at the Wexner Medical Center.
Every year, 1.1 million burn injuries require medical attention in the United States, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Recell process starts by obtaining a thin skin graft from the patient. The skin cells are placed in the Recell kit, where they reproduce in a special suspension solution for about 30 minutes. They are then sprayed on the patient’s exposed area, where they continue to grow and multiply.
Recell was approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration in September and is the first spray-on skin to win approval for the U.S. market.
The Wexner Center has been using the technology for about six months, said Dr. Amalia Cochran, a trauma surgeon there.
“I do think this is a really important advance in the care of our patients,” she said.
Recell uses smaller skin samples from patients compared to traditional skin grafting, Valerio said. A square centimeter of skin used with Recell, for example, can be used to heal a wound up to 80 times that size.
He said a patient could have 80% of their body burned, leaving only 20% of their skin left to cover the wounds.
“That’s just not enough skin for me to cover that size of an injury,” Valerio said. “But with spray-on skin, what I can do is I can take that little postage stamp and I can probably take six to eight of those, expand that and now all of a sudden I can cover your entire chest and back.”
He and others say Recell could revolutionize how doctors treat wounds in the future.
“At one point, this will probably be expanded from burn patients, to trauma patients, to patients suffering from other types of diabetic wounds or other wounds,” Valerio said.
In Ricart’s case, Wexner Center doctors took skin cells from his right thigh for the sample. He was glad they didn’t have to take skin from both of his legs and said gathering the sample was the only painful part of using Recell.
Ricard added that the total recovery time for the Recell procedure was only about two weeks.