New burns aid speeds healing process

By BILLY ADAMS

SYDNEY - Burned by cooking oil which caught fire, Sarah Lambourne's delicate young face should today bare serious scars which will remain for the rest of her life.

But the 17-year-old's clear complexion tells the story of a revolutionary new treatment which she and her family calmly describe as a "miracle".

If Sarah had suffered the fate of the vast majority of burns patients, the aftermath of her horrific accident in the kitchen would have meant skin grafts which would have taken three months to heal.

But Sarah was lucky. She was airlifted to the only public hospital in Australia which carries stocks of a new product which has been heralded as a major breakthrough in burns therapy.

Doctors applied a bio-engineered bandage to her wounds which dramatically speeds and improves the healing process. Two weeks later her burns had disappeared. There were no scars.

"I have only seen one miracle in my life and that is Sarah's face," said her mother Jill, who feared she would be disfigured for life.

Sarah, who lives near Newcastle in New South Wales, is one of 24 patients who have benefited from the treatment which has been on trial at Concord Hospital in Sydney for the past two years, and has now been given the go-ahead for general use.

The product, called Transcyte, works best on second degree burns. Effectively an artificial skin, it starts life in the unlikely location of a newborn's foreskin. Living cells are taken from circumcised babies, then grown on a net of silicone and nylon, producing growth factors and proteins.

The dressing is then deep frozen and the original cells die so there is no interaction between the cultured cells and the wound.

Doctors have compared the product's effect to that of a fertiliser on a garden. It is an artificial scab; unlike traditional bandages which have to be constantly replaced, Transcyte helps skin tissue recover, only needs to applied once and flakes off at its own rate. It also dramatically reduces the pain of burns once applied.

Although the new technique is proving to be a success, it has to be applied within 24 hours of the injury to work. It is also useless in burns cases where every layer of skin has been destroyed and surgery is required.

nzherald.co.nz/health