OSF HealthCare’s Innovator of the Year is performing an operation to save limbs with animal tissue at OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria.
Dr. Eric Martin is the OSF Saint Francis chief of vascular surgery. He alsois the medical director of Regenerative Services. In that role, Martin performs an operation combining xenograft, using tissues from animals, with allograft, tissues from humans.
“At this hospital, we use tissues derived from pigs, tissues derived from cows and tissues derived, surprisingly, from fish,” said Martin. “And the fish skin that we use actually comes out of the Icelandic waters of the northern Atlantic Ocean, with codfish exclusively.”
The procedure Martin performs treats chronic, long-lasting wounds in septic shock, or with underlying bloodstream infections. Often, the patients have been told by other medical professionals that amputation of the wounded limb is their only option.
“We've been able to very consistently and reproducibly heal these wounds and provide people with a better quality of life,” said Martin.
Martin explains the procedure works because of some unique properties of codfish skin. The pig intestine is coated in an antibacterial substance to clear biofilm and bacteria. The codfish skin is both similar to human skin and bacteria-free, due to the cold, deep waters the codfish lives in.
“There's a process by which this happens, and all of the tissues that we use have no reactivity, or do not stimulate an immunogenic response in the body,” said Martin. “So just by the way that the tissues are processed, it eliminates the body kind of going after attacking this foreign tissue or rejecting it in any way.”
When added together, he said, the combination of fish, pig, cow and human tissues contain all of the structural components needed to begin healing chronic, infected wounds. Some of the patients treated by the procedure have had the same chronic wounds for more than a year.
Martin said patients are usually suffering from conditions like long-term poorly controlled diabetes; the other condition he sees a lot in patients is chronic smoking.
“There's a lot of very deleterious effects that happen with nicotine dependence,” he said.
Before coming to OSF Saint Francis in 2022, Martin spent 20 years as a military surgeon. During his service, he operated on soldiers in U.S. Army and Navy anti-terrorism units.
“A lot of these very advanced technologies were also used to help these soldiers heal if they ended up having battle wound injuries, to get them better, to help return them to duty quicker,” he said.
Martin brought that knowledge to Saint Francis, where he has treated more than 100 patients.
“The hospital has invested several million dollars into this program to make sure that it's at the very pinnacle of care, and that if someone has a problem where they have a chronic infection and they're dying, there's nowhere to send somebody, we're it,” he said.
“People send patients to us when they can't handle the problem or the wound is too involved, and the answer is either death or amputation.”
Martin also credits an “excellent” wound care team at the hospital for his award.
“Dr. Martin last year provided the first-ever surgical treatment of a patient with a rare autoimmune disease called pyoderma gangrenosum. He is saving limbs and lives because often he’s treating patients whose wounds have become so terrible, they are on the brink of dying from sepsis, a blood-borne infection,” said Becky Buchen, senior vice president of Innovation at OSF HealthCare.
“We have a remarkable innovator in Dr. Martin who has figured out how a wide variety of products can work together synergistically to help save limbs. And we’re proud that he’s teaching other surgeons around the world how to do the same.”
More information on Dr. Martin and his work is available here.
